


Entropy

by orphan_account



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Body Horror, Disability, Gen, Manipulation, Mental Instability, Minor Original Character(s), Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-15 23:16:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9263036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The Failure of Lawrence Sonntag: That’s what the history books are going to title the chapter about his contributions to science. He was supposed to be the first glorious step towards a new stage of human progression but all that he is is in pain.Just when he’s starting to think that this what his life is going to be for the foreseeable future, he gets a phone call from a stranger:You don’t have to live this way anymore. We can help.The only problem is that they’re on another planet—literally—and Lawrence has to find a way to get there.Hire a freelance pilot, a little protection and tell them that they’re delivering a package when, really, they’re helping to steal something that belongs to a very wealthy company that might do something pretty terrible to get their property back. A lot could go wrong, but Lawrence isn’t going to tell his new friends that either.He’s just going to sit back, cross his fingers, and hope they all make it there in one piece.





	

**Author's Note:**

> More than once in the past I have found myself saying “this is weirdest thing I’ve ever written” but truly, this time, I mean it. I have never and probably will never write something as strange as this.
> 
> I have never felt so conflicted about something I've written before. For the longest time while I was working on this, I wasn't even sure I was going to post it when I finished and I'm still not entirely sure I've made the right decision. This isn’t my first rodeo (I’ve been writing and posting fic for awhile now and this isn’t even the first time that I’ve wandered into a new fandom, plopped down a weird gen sci-fi AU and then climbed back into the hole I crawled out of) but there’s something about this community that seems far more intimidating than any others that I’ve written for before. I wanted this to be perfect and I wanted everyone to be as in character as possible (as much as you can really use that term in this instance, since none of these people are really “characters”). 
> 
> I’m not entirely sure how well I accomplished either.

It’s been approximately 504 hours since Lawrence has slept and he feels remarkably well.

Upon further consideration, Lawrence thinks as he sits in a chair facing one of the only windows in his apartment (it’s not a great view, really, but it’s easier on his eyes to stare at the brick wall of the building next door and the pattern of the street lamp as it stutters; it probably wasn’t installed correctly, didn’t get enough sunlight to power it through the night and Lawrence knows how it feels, as pathetic as that sounds), there’s a lot about that sentence that either isn’t true or is a smudge or two away from being very slightly exaggerated.

First of all, the lie: He’s slept. Not in the way that normal humans sleep, where they lie down and close their eyes and dream but in the way that a computer is put to sleep, where everything just shuts down for a little while. There’s a black screen and maybe a barely distinguishable hum of something working somewhere inside but, as far as anyone else is concerned, there’s nobody home. The reason he says he hasn’t “slept” is because he isn’t able to shut down completely, mostly because he’s the only one around to turn himself back on. He put an alarm on his phone sometimes but keeping track of it required power and so did keeping his brain at twenty-percent so he’d be aware if the phone rang or, god forbid, someone tried to break in again. It was easier, really, just to say he didn’t sleep.

The exaggeration was that he was feeling “remarkably well”. Mentally, he was handling things, but he figured that if you volunteered for something like this, you’re already considerably prepared for what the hell you’re signing up for (no matter how many times the surgeons or the engineers or the technicians insist that you aren’t and they say it so many times that you start to think that they’re the ones who aren’t stable enough to deal with what they were going to do). Besides, they had talked to him for five hours straight one afternoon, tested and questioned for a month and he’d come out the other side with a red stamp on his file claiming he was good enough (those were the exact words: _good enough_ ; there was definitely something wrong with him (there had to be because otherwise he wouldn’t be there) but he wasn’t going to hang himself after they were done either so, yeah, good enough).

Physically on the other hand: he’s been better. _Some minor discomfort is to be expected_ , the head surgeon said to him once he woke up and they booted him out the sliding glass doors of the facility three days after they finished (you’d think they’d want to keep him awhile, to observe but they didn’t need him there to watch him—Lawrence learned that when a man with a scraggly moustache and coveralls invited himself into Lawrence’s apartment, dragging a toolbox behind him and handed Lawrence a piece of paper explaining in barely decipherable legal terms that he was installing cameras for “remote research” and he might as well shut up and let it happen) but apparently the doctor’s and Lawrence’s version of ‘minor’ were two very different things. ‘Minor’ to him meant muscle pain he could calm with a few over-the-counter pain pills, nausea and maybe some indigestion and not agonizing headaches, loss of time that had him coming back to his senses to find himself drooling, and the feeling like the last remaining organic pieces inside trying to squeeze out through—thankfully—plugged drill holes in his bones and skin.

He knows that they’re watching, that they see every single second, but it’s been two and a half weeks and not a single doctor or technician has come knocking to offer assistance or tinker around in places that, normally, nobody should be merely tinkering.

(The first time he nods off (he starts calling it that around the third time because it’s the least terrifying way to put it) he’s standing in his kitchen filling a glass of water and it’s 5:36PM. When he comes back, the glass is on it’s side in the sink, the water’s still running and he’s leaking. It’s 5:48PM. He thinks he can see the lens move in the camera just above the cabinets he stores his dishes. They saw it, he knows they must have, but nothing happens. They don’t call, don’t write, and his weekly one thousand dollars is wired into his bank account a day or two earlier than usual, as if that’s the only way they know how to apologize.)

( _You signed up for this_ , he says to himself at least once a day, _this is what you wanted. You wanted to be the future._ He just didn’t expect the future to fucking hurt so damn much.)

He reads and stares out the windows because he can only look at screens for a couple hours at a time. He sees things in the computers that he hadn’t been aware of before, hears a murmur from the internal pieces and the images in front of him shift and glitch. There’s a fuzziness around the edges of his eyes and letters dance for him, jittering on the pages, his brain taking in the words and then searching for definitions (they put things in there so he could move, to think better and it’s still mostly meat—unlike the rest of him inside—but sometimes he swears he can actually feel the wires _moving_ even though they had assured him it wasn’t possible, what they plugged into him wasn’t alive, it was a machine, there weren’t little octopus arms wriggling inside his laptop were there? But he still felt it somehow).

It was all a lot to handle so he stuck to paper (they still made them in small printing presses out in the middle of nowhere and they cost a lot more now than downloading entire libraries onto a tablet but the organization that did this to him was paying for it and they didn’t seem like the type to complain) and he stayed home because all the extra metal in him added a few extra pounds and set off detectors and a few car alarms here and there and he didn’t want to risk nodding off in the aisle of the nearby grocery store, standing amongst the lab grown beef and chicken nuggets made out of plant protein.

(He looked the same but he weighed ten pounds more than he had when he got there and it made him walk just a bit slower. They said he’d get used to it, he’d learn to compensate and it’d make him stronger in the end but nothing had changed. Everything they’d said to him came with a sugar-coating and a silver-lining optimism and Lawrence wonders if they had taken a seminar on positivity or if every single one of them were truly that delusional.

 _Maybe_ , a voice says to him late one night, _they like watching you suffer_. The Failure of Lawrence Sonntag would provide a decent template for what not to do to the next volunteer a year or two down the road.

None of those answers, he found, were truly comforting.)

It’s been approximately 504 hours since Lawrence got any real rest and he felt like walking into traffic might solve all his problems if he wasn’t entirely sure his body might just break the car that hit him instead.

 

— — —

 

Lawrence is sitting in his window chair, one leg crossed over the other and a sandwich in one hand, a bottle of beer on the floor because he wasn’t in the mood to clean up shattered glass again (it had been five days ago and he was still having to dig tiny green shards from the bottom of his feet). They had let him keep his stomach which he thought was mighty kind of them but they explained later that they’d simply left it because trying to build one that worked as well as the organic version was still too complicated even for their brightest minds. He knows he has a stomach and intestines but he’s not sure what else is real in there and had simply been pushed aside to make room for machinery or what was replaced completely. He doesn’t know because they vehemently refused tell him. He’d asked for pictures but they’d ignored him until the last time he asked when his night doctor finally shook her head, red curls dancing with each movement, and said: _You really don’t want to see that._

 _I do_ , he’d said. _I think I deserve to know what you did to me._

 _I’m sure_ , she’d replied, almost laughing like she was talking to an unreasonable child. _But trust me, you’re better off not knowing._

(Lawrence argued that whether he was better off knowing or not should be up to him but then he’d been shut down and when he woke up, it was morning and the room was empty. That was one way to win an argument: just turn the person you’re talking to off and leave. _That’s not fair_ , he’d said to her later. _You shouldn’t be allowed to do that._

 _We are_ , she said, laughed again as if they had developed some sort of banter. _At least we are until you leave._ She’d said that and, for a time, Lawrence had assumed that meant that once he was home, he had complete control over his own body. They’d teach him how to do it on his own and lock themselves out.

He’d been standing in front of his fridge, studying a nearly empty bottle of mustard when he realized they never specifically told him they’d changed anything. They’d just let him make his own assumptions and patted him on the arm. Sure thing, dear, whatever you say. The thought made him paranoid enough that he considered destroying the cameras and he would have if he hadn’t figured they’d send that man back to reinstall new ones in a matter of hours.

After that, he debated briefly just checking it out for himself. He knew a fair amount about tech to be able to build things on his own, to mess around with codes but hacking a tablet was a hell of a lot more different than hacking _himself_. He couldn’t see his own personal code in the back of his eyelids, which meant he’d have to plug himself into a monitor and Lawrence was relatively sure that the doctors hadn’t built a port into him anywhere. There were holes but they were closed and weren’t connected to anything in particular.

In the end, he chose to ignore that horrifying train of thought, abandon it for a later time and hope that he didn’t wake up one morning on an operating table or with his brain still self aware and floating in a jar in some basement somewhere.)

He scratches at the lengthy scar around his head even though it doesn’t actually itch, rubs his thumb against it, follows the circle through his dark hair. The skin there is numb but he’s still aware of his fingertips touching it and he balances his half-eaten sandwich on his knee to push at his temples, a headache starting to creep up on him. He could take something, but they rarely actually ended the pain completely—they just turned it down a few notches to something just slightly bearable. He might as well have been swallowing sugar pills and convincing himself that they did the job but he did it anyway because it was what you were supposed to do when things hurt: you find a way to make it stop.

“Fine,” he says to himself and stands, forgets about his lunch until it’s collecting hair on the rug. “Son of a bitch.” (The sad humor of the fact that he can’t remember if he was this forgetful before the surgery or if it was just another symptom is not lost on him.) He crouches and scoops the bread and meat into his hands, smears mustard over the tips of his fingers and he’s about to start licking some of it off but he realizes he doesn’t particularly want a mouth full of lint. He brings the remains to the sink, thinks about attempting to salvage it with his last two pieces of bread but he dumps it all into the metal basin and flicks on the water and garbage disposal, shoving the soggy food down the drain and listening to the blades chew it into mush.

Because of the noise, he doesn’t hear the phone hanging beside his fridge ringing until he turns everything off and by the time he catches on to what he was actually hearing, it stops. He eyes it almost suspiciously, as if he’s forgotten that, not only could it even make that sort of sound, but that it even worked at all in the first place. It had come with the apartment, still plugged into the wall and the man who sold it to him had explained that if he wanted it removed he’d have to call a specialist ( _It’s all full of wires_ , he had said, spoke it slowly as if he couldn’t understand, _Not many people know how to dismantle those things anymore. The previous owner was an artist, I think. Pretty sure this was supposed to be some sort of installation they forgot to take with them_ ). Lawrence figured he could probably take care of it himself in an afternoon but he decided to keep it because he liked the nostalgic feel of having there, even though he hadn’t been alive when they were actually used for something and not just a centerpiece for people his age to laugh about at parties. _Remember when our great-great-great-grandparents had to talk to each other on those things?_

Lawrence stares at it, waits, thinks maybe that there was just a rattling in his disposal that mimicked the ancient trill of a plastic phone. He stares and bides his time, doesn’t move as if it was going to explode if he even twitched his eyebrow too quickly and then he shrugs, wanders down a short hall to his bathroom to dig around in the cabinet for something that might numb the pain that was getting worse in his head. He’s got them in the palm of his clammy hand when he hears the phone start to ring again.

He rushes out to it, hesitates with his hand over the receiver, waits for the final ring before slowly picking up.

“Hello?” He hears someone breathe once, twice and then:

“Lawrence Sonntag?” The connection crackles and the voice sounds distant, as if the person calling him was standing a few feet away from what they were calling him on.

“Yes?” He adds a question mark to the end of the word, goes to pick at the skin around his thumbnail and drops the medication on the floor as he does it.

“We can help you,” the voice says and Lawrence can’t even tell if it’s male or female. It’s not what he’s expecting to hear (although, really, he couldn’t say what he _was_ expecting) and that’s all it says, as if he’s supposed to know exactly what it’s talking about. There’s another breath. “You don’t have to be in pain.”

“What? I don’t—”

“We know what ExoBio did to you. What you signed up for. We know that they’re watching you—” Lawrence tries as subtly as possibly to eye the nearest camera and the small light blinks at him as if it’s winking, “—And we also know that everything that’s going wrong with you they did on purpose. The headaches, the blackouts. How you’re feeling inside…” The voice trails off and Lawrence clenches his jaw, goes from digging his index finger at his skin to chewing at it. He should hang up, he shouldn’t listen to it. It was a prank or a test from the doctors, some complicated thing to see if he still trusted them, if he wasn’t planning on doing something stupid, if he was still on their side. “Lawrence.”

“I’m still here,” he says. He doesn’t realize he’s moved closer to the phone—further away from the line of sight from the kitchen camera—until his knee bumps the wall in front of him. He hadn’t even felt himself shift. “How— How do you know all this?” He’s lowered his voice, too, even though the man who installed the cameras assured him that it was strictly video, that they wouldn’t even be able to hear him sighing in his sleep ( _You’re going to watch me sleep?_ Lawrence had asked. _I don’t know_ , the man replied as his drill whirred a hole in the corner of the living room, _Do you have to sleep anymore?_ ).

“They had to get the idea from somewhere,” the voice says. The pain in his head is getting worse and he bends down to pick up the dropped pills, brushes them off on his pants and swallows them dry. Another pause, another breath. “They’re not side effects. We can help you.”

“Help me how?” _Hang up_ , a voice in the back of his head is saying, repeating:  _Hang up, hang up, hang up. This is no good, this is a trap. It’s only been three weeks. You’re the first, of course they’ll make mistakes. Hang up_.

“We can fix you. Make you better. You could keep it all but it wouldn’t hurt. Or we could take it out.” A throat being cleared or maybe just static. “Take most of it out.” Lawrence remembers the doctors telling him that, made sure it was one of the first things that he knew: A lot of what they were putting into him would never come back out again. Bits and pieces could be removed, unhooked, but there were parts that had been replaced that would kill him if they tried to switch it back to something organic.  _There’s only so much stress a body can handle_. (They blamed it on the fragility of the human body but Lawrence had a suspicion that maybe they just didn’t know how to reverse what they were going to do.)

He should ask who this ‘we’ that the voice kept mentioning was, should ask for a name at the very least because they knew his but he definitely didn’t know theirs but, instead, what comes out of his mouth is:

“Why?”

“Why help you? Because this isn’t what we had in mind when we developed this. You shouldn’t suffer. ExoBio is treating you like a rat, not a person.” A cough. “You can leave, can’t you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course I can leave. I’m not— I can. I can leave.” He’s not sure who he’s saying that to once the words leave his mouth for a third time. He hasn’t been outside in days.

“We can help but you’re going to have to come to us. We can’t come to you. Do you understand?” It was a weird thing to ask him and he nods before remembering that they can’t see him.

“I do. Where are you?” He doesn’t have a car but he could take a bus, pretend that he was going to visit a friend if someone in a white lab coat tried to make a big deal out of it. _It’s only been three weeks_ , the voice in his head is saying, _and you’re already jumping into bed with strangers because you can’t deal with a little pain. You’re just being paranoid and they’re playing with you. Hang up_.

“Fyto.” Lawrence is about to ask what state that’s is in, how many hours it would take him to get there but then he realizes: that’s not a city, it’s a _planet_.

“Fyto? You can’t be— You’re joking,” Lawrence says once he lets the thought process for a few seconds. “How are you calling me?” Major leaps had been made when it came to interstellar flight and communication since humans had taken the long journey to this place and made it their new home but it still wasn’t enough that someone a week-long trip away could hold a conversation without at least a five minute delay if you could afford the right boosters, ten if you could only use a knock-off (it used to be almost thirty minutes between each message—a two minute discussion could go on for nearly two hours—but then a building full of people on Outeria 4 had suffocated to death because an engineer discovered an unexpected problem he couldn’t fix on his own and the only other person who knew how to handle it was back on New Earth. By the time the home technician had figured out the source of the issue and explained how to fix it, everyone was already dead.) There’s no way they should be able to talk like this and yet here they were.

“We’re not joking,” the voice tells him. “And do you really think that the people responsible for figuring out how to do what they did to you can’t find a way to call home from another planet?” They pause as if they’re waiting for Lawrence to answer, like it wasn’t a rhetorical question and they wanted to hear how amazing they were but Lawrence doesn’t respond. “All you have to do is get here.”

“All I have to do is get there,” Lawrence repeats, leans forward to touch his forehead against the wall and closes his eyes, moves his hand over his stomach, fingers pushing at the skin as if searching for the sharp and curved edges inside him. He’d made a commitment. He’d signed contracts, he’d gone through the tests, the surgeries, he’d been treated as well as could have been expected for someone who answered an ad from ExoBio for a “live test subject”. They hadn’t given him a reason not to trust them.

 _Not until they were finished ripping you apart and putting you back together_ , that voice in Lawrence’s head says, the same one that, moments before, had been trying to convince him to not listen to anything this person was offering. _They couldn’t wait to get rid of you. ‘Minor’ discomfort, cameras, no contact. They’re watching and saying nothing._

The pills aren’t working, because the pills never do and he exhales slowly.

“Okay,” he says. “Alright. Yeah. Let’s do it.”

 

— — —

 

Taking public transportation to a facility out in the middle of nowhere was manageable, but getting past the Atmosphere Border was entirely different. Lawrence could tell himself that he was going to do it (which he did, and did not much else for a few hours after he finished the conversation with the mysterious voice, first just standing in his kitchen and then moving to his chair to stare out the window and think: _I’m going to do it._ He’d put himself to sleep and continued to think it for a couple hours more when he woke up the next morning) but those words weren’t going to make actually _making it happen_ any less difficult.

Fifteen years ago, if Lawrence had wanted to hire someone to take him to another planet, he could do it in a matter of minutes. When interstellar travel was finally approved for the public, the government handed out off-planet licenses like candy (before that, for about fourteen years, the only vessels allowed out there were military and scientific sent to discover new planets and figure out how to make travel between them faster, always faster). If you had a ship that could handle it, they’d give you one for a surprisingly fair price. Fill out some paperwork, verify your identity and a week or so later you had a card that let you soar up through the atmosphere and into the stars. There wasn’t much going on out there at the time—it was mostly construction at that point, land being cleared for future colonies, scientists setting up labs—but that didn’t stop the surge of pilots taking joyrides or sightseers spending an afternoon floating between New Earth and its two moons or the wealthy renting extravagant ships for parties in the middle of nowhere. For awhile, everything was fine and, because of that, it meant that eventually, everything had to go horribly wrong.

The sky had turned into a brand new ocean and where there’s an ocean, there were going to be pirates.

(Pirates were supposedly old fashioned, pirates rode in boats and did terrible things to those who happened to run into them on the open waters but, for a lot of people, they were merely a peripheral concern. Besides, not many people went places by water anymore and the only ones who tried rarely survived—not because of any human interference but because nature was fickle and cruel and ten years earlier, marine biologists had woken up something that lived at the very bottom of the Nepomucene Deep and no one could figure out how to put it back to sleep. Nobody knew its true size or how long it had been down there. It was unpredictable and incalculably large; numerous attempts had been made to kill it—despite protests from animal rights activists but, after awhile, even _they_ were starting to question if maybe they’d all be better off with that thing in pieces—yet, so far, no one had succeeded. Beaches had turned from vacation spots to memorials where you could spread a blanket if you felt particularly morbid. No one went swimming and, more often than not, there were weeks (sometimes months) where people were banned from travelling on the water. Not many people died because of it anymore but it was still there. Everyone knew it was still there.)

People were taking trips to space and coming home with less valuables than they left with or, occasionally, weren’t even coming home at all. Shipping vessels that were bringing equipment to builders on the twin moons of Delphi were taken over and stripped for parts and golden party ships were hijacked, the young elite inside held for ransom. Things were swept under the rug until the New Year’s Eve event where a ship packed with three thousand people was boarded by six highly armored pirates carrying a bomb they had made using parts from the CS Paramount which had been bringing explosives to Carpathia so workers could blow a hole through a mountain that was impeding on their progress (the cargo ship had only made it halfway there before they were attacked and months after it was over, the captain would go on to tell anyone who listened that he had told his government explicitly what was taken and the response had been _don’t worry about it_ and _I’m sure nothing will come of it_.)

A month later, over five hundred licenses were revoked and, from that point on, there were no more family vacations, no field trips, no parties, and no self-employed pilots. Now if you wanted to fly, you had to apply for a job at one of the four major shipping companies that had managed to stay afloat after the tragedy. You’d get a license and a ship through them, both of which you had to give up if you left. Nobody could leave the planet without a corporate logo slapped somewhere visible and those who tried were, at best, fined a number in the thousands. It didn’t stop the pirates completely (nothing ever would, there were people who lived out there now, their feet never touching soil and no one in any particular position of power knew what to do with them; did they arrest them? Who would be responsible if they did? Did they blow them out of the sky? Justifiable or murder?) but it helped calm things down, especially since nearly every vessel, no matter the size, was now filled to the brim with military-esque security teams that, reportedly, were instructed to always shoot first and ask questions much, much later.

Out of the four companies, Intergalactic Frontier was the only one who still did commercial flights, but they were for people who wanted to sit on a hard bench and stare out bulletproof, bubble-shaped windows at stars while a tour guide murmured deadpan into their ear about why that particular piece of hot gas was so much more interesting than the one next to it. Seats were reserved months in advance but, even if Lawrence could get one leaving tomorrow morning, there was no possible way he’d be able to get to Fyto. The closest he’d be able to get was if he asked the tour guide about it and they showed him a picture as they explained about the local flora and fauna.

Besides, Lawrence knew for a fact that ExoBio was partnered with Intergalactic Frontier, that they used them exclusively to ship medical supplies to workers and scientists on other planets (he’d seen the photograph projected on the wall in the waiting room just before they brought him in for the first interview to determine if he was the right candidate; it had been the CEO of ExoBio shaking the hand of the CEO of Intergalactic Frontier, a news article scrolling slowly and endlessly beside it).

 _That’s exactly what I need_ , he thought to himself as he continued to work this out in his head, _use a ship partly owned by the people I’m trying to run away from_. Hilarious irony: yes. But a truly shitty idea.

Freelancers still existed, made friends with hackers who forged licenses that would fool the Atmo Border personnel but most were one-use only and they weren’t guaranteed to work a hundred percent of the time (Lawrence had tried at one point when he was younger to get in on the game but found out if nobody knew your name or trusted someone else who did, it didn’t matter how good you were, you weren’t going to make any money or friends). You could only find them by crawling around on certain websites and you could only find those websites if you knew someone who had used one before and personally invited you. Lawrence had one of those addresses memorized thanks to someone once upon a time who had given it to him (he doesn’t remember why they did because he certainly doesn’t remember asking for it), used it to find paper books sometimes (not everything on there was for people searching for illegal services or items; that was just a single section but it was a big enough section that those sorts of sites needed their privacy) and he liked to browse when he was bored, liked to see what kinds of things other people out there wanted so desperately that they had to use illicit ways to find them.

Lawrence is in his chair once again and he turns, rests his arm along the back and narrows his eyes at the computer on his desk.

“Okay,” he says to it as he sits down, holds down the button to turn it on (the last time he’d had it on was yesterday morning but that was only for five minutes because he needed to check a file he couldn’t open on his tablet (he had the same problems on the tablet that he did with his computer, but they weren’t quite as bad; that being said, he still tried not to use it too often), “I know you and I don’t exactly get along but we’re going to have to work something out here, alright?” He can feel it start working before the screen lights up and a sound like rusted, squeaky swings on an old playground starts to vibrate in the very back of his skull. “Shit.” It was bad this time (it was always bad, truthfully, but sometimes it was just a little worse) and he checks a nearby clock, figures he has an hour at most to do what he needs to do before he can’t handle it anymore.

His fingers hover over the keyboard but he stops, glances at the camera installed in the corner, just above his now-unused television and then looks back at the screen. Lawrence had created and installed numerous roadblocks and failsafes inside his computer to stop somebody else from getting in or snooping where they didn’t belong, but that didn’t particularly matter when there were a bunch of eyes simply staring over his shoulder. He does that a couple more times—looks back and forth between his computer and the camera—and decides that turning it off and walking away (especially after that display) would be far more questionable than just moving a few things around. He turns the computer, shifts the desk and his chair, a little bit here and there, stands up and places himself where the cameras were until he knew for sure that they wouldn’t be able to see anything useful and for the briefest of moments, he considers unzipping his pants to give them a few seconds of an idea of why he might not want someone to see what he was doing but, unless he went through the motions, too, he figured whoever was currently watching him would know he was trying very poorly to fool them.

“They’re probably not even really there,” he says to himself, laughs once. This could just be some perverse psychological experiment. “Maybe they didn’t even put any shit in me. Empty boxes and a noise machine.” He pauses, sighs, scratches at one of the holes in his side. He knew it was dangerous to start thinking like that, how easy it was to start sliding into a boundless sort of paranoia. It was like drinking: you’re fine if you never start but once you do, it can be damn hard to stop (Lawrence knew a lot about that, had to quit when he was approved as ExoBio’s test subject and he hated it a lot more than he really wanted to admit. He’d asked about it when they sent him home and all they said was that it wasn’t recommended but not that he couldn’t. He bought a bottle of vodka and a six pack and then found out that it didn’t help—it hadn’t helped much before either but, like he said: stopping wasn’t easy and he didn’t have much else better to do anymore). “Goddammit.” He never should have answered that damn phone. He was already starting to question things before it and now it was getting worse.

He nudges the thoughts away and it takes him a minute to log into his account because he gets distracted by the noises in his head.

 

>   SUBJECT: PILOT NEEDED FOR IMMEDIATE PACKAGE DELIVERY.

He hesitates, chews on his bottom lip as he stares at the currently blank body of the post, flicks his gaze to the subject line again. _Apparently I’m a package now_. He hadn’t even realized he typed it until he was reading it over and he blinks, startled when the screen glitches, lines darting, the image splitting and fractioning. He should be used to it by now but he’s not. It’s over in a matter of seconds and he clears his throat.

 

> PACKAGE NEEDS DELIVERY TO FYTO. MUST LEAVE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. THERE WILL BE ONE (1) PASSENGER ACCOMPANYING SAID PACKAGE. THAT IS NON-NEGOTIABLE.
> 
> I AM OFFERING—

He stops again. ExoBio had given him a handsome sum just for saying yes, a little more once it was over and then there was the one thousand deposited every week just for existing. At this point he could offer nearly anything and the thought of that makes him laugh. He won’t use a ship owned by them to make his escape but he’ll definitely use their money and, somehow, that’s okay. But what was this worth? In the past, he’d seen people on here offer anything between one-hundred and three thousand dollars (that one was only once and the post was up for two days before it unceremoniously disappeared) but they were all going somewhere no more than three or four days away. This was Fyto; they’d be flying for at least a week, maybe more depending on how old the ship was that the pilot would be flying. The pilots were there but there wasn’t as much as a need for them as someone might think and there wouldn’t be until housing and colonies were finally filled with new citizens. Lawrence could count the number of posts looking for freelance pilots on one hand and that didn’t leave him with much of a reference point to rely on.

 

> I AM OFFERING TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS (10000).

He double-checks the spelling, chases the word ‘thousand’ across the page and removes an extra ‘u’ when he grabs at it in the corner and then hits ‘send’, sits back to wait as it sits on a digital pile for an administrator to look it over and approve it. He leans back, tilts his head up towards the ceiling and closes his eyes. It could take hours for that to happen and he considers turning himself off for awhile just to pass the time, to give his brain a break, but ten minutes after he had sent it off, he hears an unexpected _ding_.

It’s not the generic, automated approval notice though: someone from the site had opened up a conversation with him.

 

> ADMIN_O: IS THIS LEGITIMATE?
> 
> SIRLARR: IT IS.
> 
> SIRLARR: IS SOMETHING WRONG?

One second, five seconds, twenty seconds. 

 

> ADMIN_O: NOT EXACTLY, NO. I BELIEVE YOU BUT I’M NOT GOING TO POST IT.

Lawrence re-reads it three times and it’s not because of the visual glitches and the squeaky drone in his head. This is his only option. He’s not even sure yet that he believes the voice on the phone and the promise that they’ll really be able to help him but his curiosity has killed many a cat in the past and he’s not above sacrificing another. He doesn’t respond, not right away, because he doesn’t know how to beg with dignity.

Eventually, all he says is: 

 

> SIRLARR: WHY
> 
> ADMIN_O: OK I NEVER DO THIS AND DON’T TELL ANYONE THAT I DID
> 
> ADMIN_O: BUT IM NOT POSTING IT BECAUSE I ALREADY KNOW SOMEONE WHO CAN HELP YOU
> 
> ADMIN_O: ESPECIALLY IF YOU WANT THIS DONE ASAP

It’s definitely not what he was predicting he was going to read.

 

>  ADMIN_O: HIS NAME IS ADAM HE’LL BE ABLE TO GET YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO
> 
> ADMIN_O: YOU WANT HIS EMAIL?
> 
>  SIRLARR: YEAH YES DEFINITELY
> 
>  ADMIN_O: OK

 There’s another few seconds of silence and then: 

 

>  ADMIN_O: GOOD LUCK, DUDE. UR GONNA NEED IT.

 Lawrence doesn’t think he has it in him to disagree.

 

— — —

 

Adam winds up contacting Lawrence first, says that the administrator had mentioned to him that there was someone who desperately needed a pilot ( _I wouldn’t say desperate_ , Lawrence thought, frowning when he read the word but then he remembered what he had written (IMMEDIATE PACKAGE DELIVERY, MUST LEAVE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE) and had to concede that, sure, maybe he was just slightly desperate) and that they should have a conversation sooner rather than later. He suggested meeting early the next morning at a diner that happened to be only a couple blocks away from Lawrence’s apartment and, at first, he wasn’t particularly enthused by the idea (he’s been cooped up inside for quite a few days at this point and it was enough that he thought agoraphobia might be starting to fester) but, for both their sakes, it was the best option. The less that ExoBio knew about what Lawrence was planning, the better and keeping this Adam away from his own personal cameras (he couldn’t hide him from the hundreds of thousands of cameras everywhere else outside) was a smart idea.

 _How will I find you?_ Lawrence had asked.

 _The diner isn’t very popular_ , Adam had replied. _I’m usually one of the only ones there under the age of sixty_.

Lawrence discovers almost immediately upon opening the door with it’s movement detecting bell chime that crackled from a speaker attached to the hinge and stepping into the faux-fluorescent glow of the interior that Adam hadn’t been kidding; out of the six or so customers inside, only one didn’t have grey hair or sat like their bodies were attempting to curl into themselves: he was at a booth facing the door, dressed almost entirely in black, arms crossed over his chest and he didn’t stand up when Lawrence approached.

“Adam,” Lawrence says, doesn’t make it a question and doesn’t wait for Adam to nod before he sits down across from him.

“Guess you’re Lawrence,” Adam says, turns a sweating glass of water that was sitting in front of him in small circles. Lawrence waits for someone to come and ask him what he wants but nobody shows and he turns, searches around behind him. When he twists back around, he thinks he catches a split second of Adam looking away from his scar. “You have to—” Adam gestures to a small tablet attached to the side of the table up against the window.

“Right,” Lawrence says, reaches for it and starts scrolling through the options before selecting a soda he wasn’t actually sure he even wanted. He opens his mouth to say something else when a bored woman with a red apron tied around her waist wanders over and slams down his glass, brown liquid splashing, the ice clattering.

“Soda,” she says plainly and then walks away.

“Can’t understand why this place isn’t popular,” Lawrence says and Adam lifts his shoulders in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it laugh. “So…” he starts after he’s taken a sip.

“Ten thousand dollars, huh?” Adam asks.

“Ten thousand whole dollars,” Lawrence says. “To take me— my, uh, package to Fyto. I’ll give you half before we leave and the rest when we get there.” He hadn’t been sure about the protocol when it came to paying someone to do this for him and had figured splitting it was the fairest option. 

“Your package,” Adam says. “You can just tell me right now: is it drugs? It’s drugs, right?” 

“What? No. Absolutely not. It’s not drugs. It’s just… It’s just really important.”

“What the hell is so valuable that it needs to get to Fyto as soon as possible if it isn’t drugs?”

“It’s— It’s important. That’s it,” Lawrence says and then talks over Adam when he starts to ask him something else. “Look, I’ll give you an extra thousand if you promise to not ask me anymore questions.”

“You could’ve just asked me drop it,” Adam says after a moment of consideration, “But sure, I’ll take the extra thousand.” Lawrence sighs into his soda, stares down at the one or two bubbles popping at the surface. He’s not sure why he won’t just tell him the truth or, at least, part of it. He could say he’s sick, that there’s someone on there that promised to help but he’s apparently decided that dancing around it was what he was going to go with for now. “So,” Adam says. “That’s that then.”

“You’ll do it?”

“Of course I’ll do it,” Adam says. “You’re going to pay me a ridiculous amount of money. I’d be an idiot not to. Besides, I haven’t gotten to fly in awhile.”

“Awhile, huh? What’d you do? Before having to do this, I mean,” Lawrence asks after draining half his glass, which was almost entirely flat and mostly water.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars not to ask me that,” Adam says, crosses his arms again and shrugs when all Lawrence does is stare at him. “I was—” _Trying to be funny. He was trying to make a joke._ “Forget it. I worked for Shooting Star.”

“Ah. Okay.” Last month, while Lawrence was recovering from the first of many surgeries, he’d read an article about a massive security breach at Shooting Star. From what he understood, a massive file with the kind of information the company didn’t want anyone else to start picking through had managed to make it’s way into the hands of both their competition and a journalist who hadn’t gotten a big story in a fairly long time. Instead of conducting an intensive investigation to find the source of the leakage, the company had fired over a hundred pilots and office workers from the department that they figured the culprit must have come from. _Better safe than sorry_ , the vice president of the company had said. Besides, there were always new and unemployed pilots waiting in the wings to be hired to fill the empty spaces. It was a shitty thing to have hanging over your head: one mistake—and it didn’t even have to be your own—and you could be replaced.

“I had my own ship before I worked for them and had to use theirs,” Adam says even though Lawrence hadn’t asked. “It’s just been sitting in a hangar, not being used.”

“What about the Atmosphere Border?” Lawrence brings up next, the elephant in the room finally brought to both of their attentions.

“Eh,” Adam shrugs. “When they fired us en masse, a lot of us just packed our entire desks into boxes and walked out. Most of us took our licenses with us. They’ll revoke them eventually but they got rid of so many of us it’ll take weeks to take care of each person individually. They might put a notice on our accounts but that’s the best they can do for now.” He starts tapping the pad of his finger against his glass and glances out the window through the barely open blinds as if he’s expecting to see someone out there but it’s just grey skies and buildings. An old man starts to shuffle past, makes his way to the door and the bell sound crackles again as he enters.

The woman who had brought Lawrence his soda stomps out from behind the counter and walks over, not to the new customer, but to the door he just came through, cranes her neck up at the speaker, glaring at it. Lawrence had figured that the fuzziness was because it was ancient or shoddily made tech purchased by the owner who wanted to play on someone’s sentimentality but didn’t want to spend any real money on it but now Lawrence is starting to think that maybe it’s _him_ that’s the problem. She smacks at it with the palm of her hand in an attempt to get it working right again and Lawrence wishes he could do the same to himself.

“Two other guys I worked with have done test runs, told me they got past.” He shrugs again and scratches the side of his face. “Those border guys are mostly drones, anyway. They swipe the card and if the light turns green they let you through. There’s a hundred other people stacked up behind you, they don’t have time to read every file.” There’s a clatter of dishes from the kitchen and it’s so sudden and loud that Lawrence is almost concerned that he’s going to look around and find that everyone else inside had had simultaneous heart-attacks. Without saying anything, Adam takes a small tablet that fit neatly in his hand out of his pocket and starts typing, moving his finger down along the side of the screen. “So just the three of us?” He asks. Lawrence looks between the two of them and furrows his eyebrows. “Me, you and Peake.” 

“Peake?” 

“He’s going to keep my ship running. I’m just the pilot, Lawrence. Something mechanical goes wrong, I’d have no idea how to fix it. We worked together at Shooting Star and he was ditched along with the rest of us. But you don’t have to worry about him. He’s quiet, keeps to himself. You probably won’t even know he’s there most of the time.” He hadn’t been looking at Lawrence the entire time, kept his fingers moving but then he pauses, stares up at him. “So three.”

“Actually… no,” Lawrence says. He had thought about this during the time he had to walk here and realized that just him and a pilot (and now some guy named Peake) wasn’t going to be enough. He’d been so focused on figuring out how to get to where he needed to go, that he’d almost forgotten who he was running from. The machinery and technology inside his body wasn’t stamped with the ExoBio logo because it looked good; it belonged to them— _he_ belonged to them, in a sick sort of way. Someone might see it as being no different than what Adam and the rest of his co-workers had been fired for: stealing company secrets. If he was lucky, Lawrence would already be off-planet by the time anyone realized something was wrong, but he also didn’t think they’d just sit on their hands or send him a politely worded message asking him to come back, pretty please. If he were them, he’d go after himself and do whatever was necessary to get him back. “I want some protection.”

“Protection,” Adam repeats. “Like security? For a package delivery to Fyto.” He blinks at Lawrence, narrows his eyes just slightly. “Are you sure it’s not drugs?”

“It’s not—!” Lawrence removes his glasses to cover his face with his hands and he breathes into his palms for a couple seconds before pulling them away and putting his glasses back on. “I’m a paranoid asshole. Sue me.”

“Alright, fine. Whatever. Protection.” He types something else. “Who exactly?”

“I don’t know,” Lawrence admits. “I was kind of hoping you might know some people.”

“Why would you assume that?” Adam asks.

“I don’t know!” Lawrence reiterates. “I just thought maybe you— Since you’re—” Another deep breath. “So you don’t?” He’d have to go back to the site again, create another request and hope that the administrator that pointed him towards Adam would actually post it this time. He’d take the first couple people who replied and hope that they didn’t try to kill any of them in their sleep once they’d left the surface.

“I didn’t say that,” Adam says, and then: “Two hundred.”

“Two hundred what?”

“Dollars. Two hundred dollars and I’ll help you hire on someone.”

“Absolutely not!” Lawrence says. “No way! I’m not— I’m not giving you money just to— No.”

“What do you mean ‘no’?! You offered me a thousand dollars just to stop asking questions but you won’t give me _two hundred_ for a legitimate service?”

“Legitimate—” Lawrence starts to argue but Adam is turning to stand up, makes it to the edge of his side of the booth, starts to hoist himself up and Lawrence reaches out, grabs his elbow to stop him. “Fine. Look. Here…” He digs out his wallet from his back pocket, slides his card out and snatches Adam’s small tablet from his hand without asking if he could, opens a new window, puts in a few numbers and a name and waves his card over the screen. “Look.” He shows it to him, the negative sign besides the two hundred that had just been removed from his account. Adam stares at it for longer than he probably needed to and then takes the tablet back.

“Great,” he says, removes himself from Lawrence’s grip. “Don’t forget to pay for your soda.”

 

— — —

 

“We’re going right now?” Lawrence asks when he catches up to Adam outside, his hands dug deep in his pockets.

“I thought this trip was urgent,” Adam says.

“True. It is. So are we taking your car or what?”

“Really?” Adam asks, stops walking and Lawrence trips on his heels, back-tracks.

“I don’t have one. I walked here,” Lawrence tells him, shrugs a shoulder and Adam responds to that by saying nothing and shaking his head. He starts moving again and Lawrence takes that as a sign to keep following. There’s a pain pushing just behind his ears—had started right around the same time he used the diner’s tablet to order his drink—and he touches the spot where it’s bothering him the most, grinds his teeth. _If I can’t be outside for more than an hour or two, how the hell am I going to manage on this guy’s ship?_ Older ships—which Adam’s most likely was, if he’s had it since before he was hired on by Shooting Star—were mostly metal and fuel, but even the most ancient models still had a computer on board somewhere; you couldn’t fly without one (someone had tried once, to get to the closest moon and back basically in a metal box for some charity; he’d raised over half a million but only made it halfway there before he got lost somehow and then realized he hadn’t packed enough oxygen tanks to last him the entire trip). _Maybe I can just sleep the entire time_ , he thinks but he’s only put himself out for six or eight hours at time, had no idea if it was possible, let alone safe, to keep himself shut down for an entire week without waking up. There was still meat in there, he still needed to eat, still needed water and he wasn’t sure if starving himself before he even got to Fyto was really going to help anyone.

 _Adam would be six thousand and two hundred dollars richer at least_ , Lawrence thinks, already adds on the extra thousand he’d offered Adam not to ask questions. _Wouldn’t get to the full eleven since I’d be dead._ He glances at him as they turn a corner down a narrow street that only seemed to be used for people to park their cars (the buildings themselves—packed together so tightly Lawrence was surprised they weren’t inside of each other—looked abandoned, as if there had been some sort of mass evacuation and everyone collectively decided it wasn’t worth it to come back). _I should just tell him, just tell him everything about what I’m getting him involved in. Maybe the security would make sense to him. Maybe he’d realize why this is so important_.

He’s actually about to do it as Adam stops beside a beat-up, dark vehicle but is interrupted by the alarm immediately starting to go off.

“What the—” Adam mutters, pushes a button to unlock the car and opens the driver’s side door, leaning in to hit something on the dash and the alarm stops for twenty seconds before starting up again. “What is— It’s never done this before,” Lawrence can hear Adam shout over the noise. He twists himself to sit down and pushes something else. The engine coughs, rumbles on and the wailing finally stops for good.

“It doesn’t like me,” Lawrence says, which is surprisingly more true than Adam probably thought it was. He gestures to the passenger seat and Lawrence rounds the back of the car, the door clicking when it opened, only going far enough that he had to squeeze himself in and he has to put effort into closing it once he’s inside.

“Alright,” Adam says, backing out of the space, “Let’s go get Bruce.”

 

— — —

 

They drive for almost half an hour and Lawrence keeps his head down for most of it. He thinks he hears Adam ask him if he’s alright at one point when they’re at a stoplight but he’s not sure so he doesn’t answer him other than to lift a shoulder that could either be interpreted as an acknowledgement that he heard him or a simple shift of his body in his seat.

The building that Adam eventually parks in front of is falling apart, the brick notched, chunks missing in places, what looked like a misshapen set of gargoyles missing wings and heads plastered to the edge of the flat roof. A woman with a scraggly dog walks past and the mutt starts snarling at Lawrence, who takes an instinctive step back, puts himself just slightly behind Adam until they had both continued on their way. The black paint on the metal railing planted lopsided on the concrete stairs leading to the frosted glass front doors flecks off into the palms of their hands. When Adam tries the handle, the door opens easily and they simply walk in.

“He’s just on the second floor,” Adam says, leans against another heavy door just past the toy-box sized lobby and starts climbing, the staircase dim, their footsteps echoing. A third door opens up into a carpeted hallway and Adam takes Lawrence all the way to the other end where it opens up into a square space with a huge window that poured in natural light, a table and a couple chairs leaking stuffing placed there for anyone who wanted to use them, although Lawrence couldn’t understand why they would.

There are two apartments just before this space and Adam knocks on the door to the one with a tightly screwed on number fourteen. There’s a couple seconds of silence and then Adam is leaning forward slightly, listening.

“What was—?” Lawrence watches as Adam’s eyes widen and he shouts for him to move, grabs onto Lawrence because he isn’t reacting fast enough, pulls him away from the door and flat against the wall and, just as they roll to the side, there’s a deafening _bang_ and the door explodes with wooden shrapnel. “Fuck!” Adam yells when it’s over. “Jesus Christ, Bruce!”

“Adam?” A voice asks from inside and Adam and Lawrence separate, look to the door again which now had an impressive sized hole punched through it. A bearded face appears in the space left behind and looks immediately apologetic. “Holy shit, dude. I’m so sorry. Are you alright? Did I get ‘ya?”

“We wouldn’t be talking right now if you’d gotten me,” Adam grumbles, picks splinters off the sleeve of his jacket, points at Lawrence’s head and Lawrence touches his hair, removes a few shard of wood from it with very subtly quivering fingers. His ears are ringing but he’s not sure if that’s the normal sort of sound he’s used to coming from his own head or because of the close quarters gunshot.

“Fair enough,” Bruce says and he opens the door to reveal that he was still holding a gun that was about the same length as his entire arm. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he says when nobody moves. “Come on in!” He turns, moves deeper into the apartment and they follow, Lawrence leaning on the door to shut it behind him, looks back through the hole, staring at the damage to the other side before joining the other two. Bruce lays his weapon down carefully on his coffee table and wanders towards his kitchen. “You guys thirsty? Want a soda or something? Dried cranberries? I bought way too much. I can’t eat them all myself.”

“No,” Adam says, speaks for the both of them, and Bruce shrugs, pulls a glass down and gets some water just for himself. “Expecting someone else?”

“Yeah,” Bruce says, finishes his glass and starts walking around as if looking for something. “You know how it is.” Lawrence is pretty sure that he doesn’t, but Adam seems to understand, nods once. “I certainly wasn’t expecting _you_ though. You get hired by Shooting Star and I don’t get to see you anymore.” He crouches down beside his couch and starts to feel around underneath it but he apparently doesn’t find what’s he’s looking for.

“They’re very strict, you know that,” Adam says, moves when Bruce crab-walks over to where he’s standing and starts tugging on what appears to be a sweatshirt that he was standing on. “But I don’t work for them anymore so…”

“Right, Yeah,” Bruce says, brings the sweater to his front door, holds the fabric over the hole. “Heard about that.” He comes back, goes over to a drawer just beside his sink and takes out a miniature nail gun, brings both that and the sweatshirt back to the hole in the door. “Hey, big guy,” Bruce calls out and it takes Lawrence a second to realize that he’s talking to him. “Hold this for me.” He nods at the sweater and Lawrence does it because he really doesn’t have a reason not to, keeps the sleeves spread and listens to the _ca-thunk_ of each nail Bruce jams into the door. “Good enough for now,” he says when he’s finished. “Bruce,” he says finally, holds out his hand and Lawrence accepts it, introduces himself back. “So what’s up?” Bruce asks once they converge again in the living room. “Not that I’m not happy to see you but, you know. I figure something must be going on.”

“I need to get a package to Fyto,” Lawrence says. “Adam’s flying me there.”

“He needs protection,” Adam says and Bruce frowns back and forth at them.

“Protection? For a package delivery?” He bends slightly closer to the pair of them, lowers his voice, speaks through the side of his mouth as if there was someone else in the room who might be listening. “Is it drugs? You can tell me if it is, it’s okay.”

“It’s not— It’s— It’s not drugs!” Lawrence very nearly shouts. “I don’t know why you guys think—” 

“What is it, then?”

“He’ll give you a thousand dollars not to ask anymore questions,” Adam says.

“Really?” Bruce raises his eyebrows at Adam and then turns them on Lawrence. “For real?”

“What? No! I won’t—” He glares at Adam who offers the barest hint of what might have been mistaken for a smile. “He’s kidding. I’m not doing that.”

“He did it for me,” Adam says.

“You did it for him?”

“I panicked!” Lawrence exclaims. “Nobody is getting anymore money!” 

“So I won’t be getting paid?” Bruce asks and Lawrence exhales slowly, closes his eyes.

“No,” Lawrence says. “I mean, yes. You’ll be paid. Sure. Why not. Two thousand. Is that alright?” He looks to Adam, as if daring him to mention the fact that Lawrence was paying him eight thousand or so more than that but, surprisingly, he doesn’t say a word. Bruce shrugs.

“I guess you’re on board then,” Adam says.

“Heck yeah I am,” Bruce says. “I need some excitement. When’re we going? End of the week or—?”

“Before that,” Lawrence says. “As soon as humanly possible.”

“Alright,” Bruce says, “I can manage that. Just wait there.” He disappears down a short hallway and into a room and they can hear him moving things around, opening and closing doors, and ten minutes later he walks back out with a bag slung over his shoulder.

“We’re not leaving _right now_ ,” Adam says to him and Bruce just shrugs again.

“So I’ll bunk with you until we do. Besides, I’m probably better off not staying here for awhile.” He steps forward, slaps both Adam and Lawrence on their shoulders. “This is great. This is going to be fun!” He moves between them, hefts up the gun he’d nearly killed them with, tucks it under an arm and heads for his broken door.

 

— — —

 

“So where’re we headed?” Bruce asks from the backseat, leaning forward into the space between Adam and Lawrence and Adam glances at him in the rearview mirror, both hands gripping the steering wheel as they cruise down a highway, passing by signs that flashed notices and real-time updates about accidents and traffic.

“Well,” Adam says, “First, I’m dropping this guy—” He gestures with a thumb at Lawrence, “—back where I found him. Or close enough. Then I have to go home, go over the ship with Peake, make sure it’s actually going to be able to fly. We should probably be able to head out either tomorrow or the day after.”

“And Peake is…?” Bruce prompts.

“A good guy,” Adam says. “Don’t worry about it.” He takes only a second to glance down at the dashboard in front of him, at the brightly lit gauges and numbers and curses under his breath. “Dammit. Hold on.” He moves the car over, takes the next exit into a town that seemed to have been specifically built for people who needed somewhere to stop and he chooses one of the three available gas stations, slides into the spot a van had just abandoned. “I hate this stupid car. Leaks like a goddamn sieve,” Adam says, talking mostly to himself and as soon as he turns the vehicle off, the alarm starts whining again.

People are starting to stare, the cashier inside the tiny convenience store currently hovering near a phone, having looked up just in time to see three guys sitting in a car with a blaring alarm and it was fairly easy to make a few very wrong assumptions but, suddenly, a foot comes stretching out from between the seats, the heel slamming on a spot just beside the steering wheel and the noise stops.

“Sometimes you just have to give it a piece of your mind, you know?” Bruce says once he brings his leg back and Adam pats at the spot where Bruce had kicked but, other than a minor dent in the material, it didn’t seem like there was anything horribly broken. He doesn’t say anything about it and climbs out, slamming the door and walking around to the other side to start fumbling with the pump. Lawrence does his best to stare straight ahead out the windshield at the fast moving, low clouds and a flashing street light that shouldn’t have even been on. His head hasn’t stopped throbbing since he left the diner, a tinny whine buzzing deep in his ears.

 _This has to be a side effect_. _They couldn’t have done this to me on purpose. It just isn’t right._ It’s the last thing that goes through his head before everything goes black.

When he wakes up, he’s still in the car and the car is still at the gas station and Adam was still standing outside, waiting for the tank to fill. He must have only been out for two minutes or less, which he’d almost feel good about if it had happened when he wasn’t in mixed company.

 _Maybe no one noticed_ , Lawrence thinks right about the same time Bruce asks:

“Dude, are you okay?” He’s sitting sideways to give himself a better view of Lawrence’s profile or maybe so they didn’t have to get uncomfortably close when he tried to hold a conversation. Lawrence wipes at the corner of his mouth, finds that less time didn’t mean less drool. “I looked away for a _second_ and then when I turned back you looked like you’d fucking died. I actually checked your pulse.” As awful as it was to experience, Lawrence supposed it was interesting to finally know what he looked like to the people watching him on those cameras. He had figured it was more ‘zoning out’ than ‘corpse’, though.

“That happens sometimes,” Lawrence says and leaves it at that, expects Bruce to ask for specifics so he starts to try and figure out the easiest way to answer him without having to choose between lying or telling the truth but instead all Bruce says is:

“Man, that sucks. Does it happen a lot?”

“Not really,” Lawrence tells him. It seemed to be happening more often now, though, and for longer periods of time. This was the first one that had been this short and Lawrence wasn’t sure if that meant something or not. Things could be improving or maybe it was the beginning of it getting worse. Maybe he was going to start losing two or three minutes multiple times in one day. Maybe at some point he wouldn’t just be leaking saliva. Maybe one time he’d nod off and never wake up. It wasn’t something he wanted to spend time thinking about but it was difficult not to.

“It have to do with this sucker?” Bruce asks, reaches over to touch fingertips briefly to the scar on Lawrence’s head.

“A thousand dollars,” Lawrence says, “If you stop asking me questions.” Bruce gives him a look like he couldn’t believe that Adam was actually telling the truth about that earlier.

“Seriously?”

“No. But please just… don’t,” Lawrence says, is surprised when Bruce puts his hands up in mock surrender, conceding to his wishes and Lawrence watches as Adam finishes paying and starts making his way back to the driver’s side. “And don’t tell him.” Bruce mimes zipping his mouth shut just as Adam throws himself into his seat.

 

— — —

 

Adam does as he said he would and drops Lawrence off in front of the diner that they had met at and he tells Lawrence that he’ll get in contact with him when everything is ready, drives off before Lawrence could even say goodbye. The walk back to his apartment feels like it’s longer than it was before, which he knows is impossible. He sways slightly as he moves and he hums something under his breath, a tune that he doesn’t recognize.

A couple days ago he had dropped his sandwich on the floor and now he was planning his escape to another planet—not _planning_ : he was doing it. It was going to happen.

“What the hell are you doing, Lawrence?” He says it out loud, tries to keep it quiet enough so he wasn’t stared at, but he figures if someone _does_ overhear him, they’d just assume he was talking to someone else, an earpiece lodged somewhere in his ear (the devices were getting smaller and smaller and Lawrence liked the look of them but never quite understood how there weren’t thousands of people in the emergency room every day begging a doctor to retrieve it because it got pushed in just a little bit too far). It was a decent question but he definitely didn’t have a good enough answer. He’d already gone over it so many times since he talked to the voice on Fyto, had picked through each word they said to him, tried to explain to himself how they were wrong, what were lies and what didn’t make sense and it was easy but it also didn’t stop another part of him from whispering _but what if they’re telling the truth?_

He wishes they would call him again. If he could just ask a few more questions, if they could just explain one or two more things— All he has, though, is a few promises and a handful of assurances. Lawrence supposes people have made a lot worse decisions with a lot less.

When he finally gets inside, he’s half expecting to have someone from ExoBio waiting for him or, at the very least, a note tacked up somewhere asking him where he went, what he was doing, he hasn’t left the house for this long a time in almost three weeks now, what was suddenly so important that he had to disappear like that? But there’s nobody. Just the same empty sets of rooms, the same cameras that blinked and whirred at him.

If he was really leaving tomorrow, it meant he had to pack. There weren’t any cameras in his bedroom—it hadn’t mattered in the end, since he didn’t need to lie down to sleep anymore—which was only minorly helpful; they were still nearly everywhere else and he had no idea how he was going to manage to slip out his one and only door with a duffel bag stuffed full of clothes and his toothbrush without anyone noticing. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe, like Adam with his illegal license, ExoBio wouldn’t notice what was happening until they were long gone and halfway to Fyto.

He finds himself sitting in his chair again, watching the erratically glowing street lamp and counting the broken pieces in the brick of the building next door. He doesn’t remember telling his body to shut down but he can feel it happening and he doesn’t stop it.

 

— — —

 

When Lawrence wakes up, the first thing he hears is his phone ringing. He jumps up, rushes, not for his jacket where he had left it, but to the phone by the fridge. His hand is on the plastic receiver but he freezes before picking it up, realizes what he’s doing and turns to shuffle towards his coat that had been tossed on his small kitchen table.

“Yes? Hello?”

“It’s Adam,” the voice says on the other end.

“Oh. Hey. What’s going on?”

“I know it’s early but I figured you’d want to know: the ship checks out. We’re ready when you are.”

“Early? The ship—” Lawrence finally looks around, checks the light outside and then the clock on his microwave. _It’s morning. How long was I out for?_ He thought it had been just for a short nap, mistook the low light as the sun going down instead of up but, according to everything he’s seeing around him, he had been asleep for nearly _sixteen hours_.

“Lawrence!” Adam says his name as if it wasn’t the first nor the second time he’s said it.

“Hm? What?”

“You heard me, right? I said—”

“I’m here. I mean, yeah, I heard you. I just need to pack— To _finish_ packing. Twenty minutes.” He hesitates. “Thirty minutes.”

“Okay,” Adam says. “Bruce’ll be waiting for you outside the diner.” The call ended, Lawrence has to stop himself from moving too quickly, instead walks as casually as he can towards the narrow hallway, two doors on one side and one on the other, chooses the single one on the left. After walking into the room, he drops to his knees, feels around and pulls a dusty bag out from under his bed. He shakes it, coughs, picks hair off his tongue and then starts yanking drawers open, stares at everything before grabbing clothes by the handful and stuffing them inside. He takes a few shirts down from hangers in his closet, ducks across the hall to his bathroom and empties his entire medicine cabinet into the bag, pushes everything down with the palm of a sweaty hand and tugs the difficult zipper closed.

When he walks back out to the rest of his apartment, he realizes that that whole flurry of movements had only taken him five minutes. He’d left the bag in his bedroom until he was sure he had to leave so he busies himself by setting a stale muffin down on his kitchen table and making coffee, goes back to the bathroom while the machine worked (there were new ones now (there were always new ones) that could make it for you in thirty seconds but Lawrence was nowhere near able to afford one (or he used to not be able to) and so he had a clunker that, once upon a time, took ten minutes but now took almost twenty) and takes a quick shower.

When he’s finished, he sits at his table, hair still dripping slightly, holding his mug, crumbs on his fingers, his leg bouncing impatiently. He’s so focused on waiting without making it look like he’s actually waiting for something that the shrill call of his phone has him nearly topple out of his chair. He fumbles with it, almost drops it, and when he finally has the screen pointed towards his face the right way up, he can practically feel the color draining from his own face. 

ExoBio.

Lawrence glances at the kitchen camera because he can’t help himself but it offers him nothing in the way of an answer as to why this was happening _right now_. They didn’t talk to him, it wasn’t what they did, that much they had made clear the second they had sent him home. He was their experiment to be observed and you don’t interfere with that if it could be helped; they hadn’t even scheduled check-ups, no appointment cards telling him to stop by every two or three weeks to be poked and prodded and scanned and questioned. Just go home, live with these cameras, take our money. So why now? Why were they suddenly so interested in speaking to him?

 _They know_ , a voice says in Lawrence’s head and, for the very first time, Lawrence is actually worried that it’s the machine nestled in his brain that’s speaking to him. _They know what you’re doing_. But how could they? They promised him that the cameras didn’t record audio, they couldn’t have heard him on the phone. He turned his computer away from them. _Do you hear yourself?_ The voice asks. _‘They promised’_.

The ringing stops and he stares down at the phone, waits, and just as he’s beginning to think that maybe it was a fluke, someone dialed the wrong number, it starts again.

_It’s not going to stop._

“Yes?” He stands, starts walking around, pacing to do something with the sudden burst of anxious energy.

“Mister Sonntag.” It’s pleasant, the woman’s voice on the other end. It’s the kind of soothing sound you’d want to hear if you were being called by a doctor but, at this very moment, Lawrence is feeling anything but soothed. “We’re so sorry to spring this on you so suddenly but we’d really appreciate it if you would stop by our office this morning.” Lawrence tries to cough away the lump starting low him his throat.

“This morning,” he repeats. “What’s this about?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” she says and Lawrence can practically hear the forced smile as she speaks, “We’d just like to discuss something with you.”

“If it’s so urgent,” Lawrence says, “Then can’t you just tell me now?”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. It really would be best if we spoke to you in person.”

“Oh. Well, uh… Sure. Yeah. I can be there in an hour.” He’s not sure why he says it; if they’re simply watching him, they know he’s not doing anything but sitting at his table staring into space and that he won’t do much else than that until he leaves and if they _do_ know what he’s planning, it didn’t matter what time he said he would be there because they both knew he wasn’t going to show. 

“That’s great,” she says, still smiling with every word. “Someone will be in the lobby to escort you upstairs when you arrive.” And just like that, she ends the call. Did she really believe that or were they just playing a game, telling each other what the other person wanted to hear? Was that their first move, call and wait to see what he’d do next? _Maybe they’re trying to scare me_ , he thinks. _If I show up they’ll know it worked or they want me to think they know I’m up to something and—_

Lawrence stops himself, closes his eyes, breaths in and out through his nose. That kind of thinking wasn’t going to help. It didn’t matter what their motivations were, he wasn’t going to be striding into their minimalist lobby in an hour to, at best, take a meeting with whomever wanted to talk to him or, at worst, be strapped down and taken out of commission. He busies his nervous brain by trying to think of how he was going to smuggle his bag out with him but then puts the brakes on that particular train of thought as well and laughs.

“Fuck it,” he says, marches towards his bedroom and snatches the bag, slinging it prominently over his shoulder after he’s pulled on his jacket. Shoving his feet into his shoes, he stands in the center of his apartment, where he knows that nearly every camera most likely had a decent line-of-sight on him and, not sure what else he’s should do, he awkwardly clears his throat and then walks out, locking the door behind him.

 

— — —

 

Bruce is already parked in Adam’s car—the engine still running and a back wheel on the curb—when Lawrence finally makes it to the diner. He’s ten minutes late, apologizes for it when he slides into the passenger seat. He shoves his bag down at his feet, rests his heels on it, knees pressed uncomfortably up towards his chest, but it was easier than trying to squeeze it behind him into the backseat.

“No problem,” Bruce says in reply to Lawrence’s apology, pulls onto the street without looking, only making it a few feet before he has to stop at a red light. “So where is it? This package we’re delivering. It can’t be that big if Adam’s going to be taking it. He’s not exactly flying a freighter.”

“It’s here,” Lawrence says, kicks at the bag to make him think that’s where it is and not, in fact, seated directly beside him.

“You ever been out there before?” Bruce asks, passes an old woman driving ten miles under the speed limit and she lifts her hand in what Lawrence figures was meant to either be an attempt at a threatening gesture or a way of saying sorry for what she was doing. He’s distracted enough that it takes him a second to figure out that by _out there_ , Bruce means _up in space_.

“Nah. Never had the opportunity.” He was already out of school by the time teachers were taking their students on field trips to one of the nearby moons and he’d considered taking the exam for his pilot’s license but four days before the first test, the New Year’s Eve attack happened and, a month later, nobody was getting a license anymore. He never booked himself on a tour because he was busy and then, when he wasn’t, it was too late. The closest he’s gotten to the stars was watching videos or standing on the fire escape on an extremely rare clear night and looking up.

“You know, for someone who keeps offering people money to stop asking you questions, you don’t seem to be having much trouble answering most of mine.”

“I know,” Lawrence says, “I don’t get it either.” He doesn’t, not really, except it’s most likely because Bruce isn’t needling him for specifics about what he clearly doesn’t want to talk about. He’s just making conversation, not asking anything too personal and he still hasn’t asked _what_ the package is, other than to make sure that it wasn’t drugs. Adam might have been trying to do the same back at the diner when they first met, but Lawrence would never really know if that was true or not now since he seemed to be fulfilling his end of the _here’s the money, don’t ask_ agreement. “Have you?”

“Have I—?”

“Been, you know, _out there_.” He uses Bruce’s phrase but it sounds weird coming out of his mouth. They’re at another light and Bruce leans sideways just a bit, looks down at the road, says _goddammit_ , under his breath and turns the wheel, tries to sneak the car between two electric vehicles in the left lane, the turn signal audibly clicking.

“Uh… Yeah, sure. I used to work for Shooting Star, too. Guess Adam didn’t tell you that,” Bruce says and Lawrence figures he must have looked surprised or that Bruce knew Adam well enough to know that he probably hadn’t said anything. “I was there before he got on board. I told him not to work for them but they were the only ones hiring at the time and he needed the work. Now I guess he knows why they’ve always got positions open.” He shrugs, chuckles. “I did what I’m going to do for you,” he says.

“Protection.”

“Well, They called it ‘security’, but yeah. Right. Took that gun I nearly killed you with with me when I left. I was so sure that they’d come after me for it but they never did. Probably afraid I was going to use it on them.” He laughs again. “Guess they figured as long as they didn’t hear a news story about me shooting up a restaurant or something, they could afford the loss. Who knows, though, man. It’s been almost a year and there’s a part of me that’s still waiting for them to come and lock me up.”

“Is that who you were shooting at when Adam knocked?”

“That was something else,” Bruce says, turns down a surprisingly suburban sort of street and stops in front of a beige-painted house with a brown roof and lopsided porch, weeds growing from the stone pathway leading to the front steps and he leans on the horn. “I’d offer you a thousand not to ask anything else but all I have is twenty bucks.” He honks again, this time in three quick bursts, and the front door opens just wide enough for Adam to lean out and yell at him to _shut the hell up_. He leaves it open but disappears back inside the house instead, comes back five minutes later with two bags and Bruce’s gun. He closes the door with his elbow, bends awkwardly to lock it and then shuffles towards them, kicks at the back. “Oh, right,” Bruce says, pushes a button to pop the trunk and they hear a _thud_ as Adam dumps everything inside.

“My ship’s parked in a hangar about thirty minutes from here,” Adam says as he climbs into the backseat, “Just drive straight, take a right. It’s not hard to miss.”

“‘Hi, Bruce, thanks for being so quiet this morning and not waking me up before you left, hope my couch wasn’t too uncomfortable’. ‘Good morning, Lawrence, how are you’,” Bruce says in a truly awful impression of Adam, staring at him in the rearview mirror for a moment before starting to drive again.

“Good morning, person paying me a lot of money to deliver a package, how are you?” Adam says to Lawrence and then frowns at the back of Bruce’s head. “Hello, Bruce. Thanks for sweating all over one of my only nice blankets.”

“Close enough,” Bruce says and they ride the rest of the way in silence.

 

— — —

 

The hangar is indeed hard to miss: an impressively sized metal building with two enormous doors, a small building attached close to the chainlink fence with rusted barbed wire tangled around the top, a smooth runway stretching off into the distance, paved over overgrown, dried grass and if Lawrence hadn’t seen a shadow moving around in what he figured was the owner’s office space, he’d think this place was abandoned.

Bruce stops at the gate and Adam hops out of the car, digs a card out of his wallet, inserts it into a machine, waits for a small light to beep from red to green and the gate creaks open. He gestures for Bruce to follow, doesn’t bother getting back in and Bruce drives slowly, rolls over a pothole and parks on a worn patch of grass, sits it beside a windowless van with a flat tire and a company logo that was in bad need of a new paint job. It’s Bruce’s turn to unload the trunk and saddle himself with everything inside and both he and Lawrence jog to catch up with Adam, who had just finished peeking his head inside the scratched glass door of the small building. He waves once at the person inside and they’re greeted with the ungodly thunder of the hangar door closest to them screeching open.

The grey morning light slowly reveals an impressively sized cruiser, although it wasn’t nearly as sleek as some of the other models Lawrence had seen before; where the new ones were more rounded and smooth, this one was square and clunky, like it was made with clicked-together pieces from a child’s set of toy bricks. Lawrence understood what Bruce had meant when he said that the package must not be very large if Adam was the one taking them there; at most, it looked as if they’d be able to fit a version of Adam’s car that was about three times smaller than it was now, and that wasn’t accounting for wherever they were going to sleep and pass the time.

“Here we are,” Adam says as if he felt there was something that needed to be said but he couldn’t think of anything else, hands in his pockets as they all stand in the massive doorway.

“Man,” Bruce says, “She still looks good.”

“You really thought that just because I wasn’t using it, I’d let it turn into junk?” Adam asks just as a door in the side of the ship lifts open and a head that was mostly hair and a beard looks out, hands gripping the sides to keep balance.

“Hey, guys,” the man says with a soft voice as they walk over to him and he stares down at them for a few seconds before crouching to hop onto the cracked concrete floor. “I guess you’re Bruce,” he says, shakes Bruce’s hand. “And you must be Lawrence. I’m Matt. Peake is fine, though, a lot of people call me that. I try to keep things from falling apart, pretty much.”

“And it hasn’t yet so I’d say you’re doing alright,” Adam says, and then pulls out his tablet, starts to read something and sighs. “We should get going. The border will start getting real busy in an hour and if we don’t leave now, we might be waiting in line until this afternoon.” He hoists himself inside first, Bruce following, Peake right after and Lawrence takes a step forward but stops, the cool metal of the ship underneath the palm on his left hand. He’d already come to terms with his decision to leave; it was what was going to happen to him once he stepped inside the ship that was worrying him still. He might be fine, might just have to deal with more headaches and fuzzy vision but he could also put one foot on the floor and start screaming the second the engine starts, too.

“Hey,” Peake says, coming back towards the door, looking down at Lawrence. “You good?”

Lawrence is about to answer, make an excuse about being nervous about flying, about it being his first time, when the hair on the back of his neck stands on end, a crawling feeling moving up his spine. He turns his head slowly, hoping it was just nerves but there, parked on the other side of the locked gate is a shiny, black car, the nose angled directly at them. It wasn’t moving and nobody made a move to exit the vehicle; it was just sitting, watching.

Lawrence says nothing, keeps staring at the vehicle as he climbs up into the ship. Peake’s staring, too, moves off to the side to let Lawrence in and neither of them look away until Peake had hit a button, the door clanging shut.

“They here for you?” Peake asks but Lawrence doesn’t answer. They find Adam and Bruce in the cockpit, Adam already in his chair, punching numbers and words onto a large screen stretched out in front of him and the ship comes to life with a low rumble.

The car is still there as Adam rolls the ship out onto the runway, and it’s still there as he’s picking up speed. It’s still there, too, as they finally take to the sky, making sure to stay low enough that they won’t get spotted by one of the hundreds of thousands of Border Drones. It doesn’t follow them and, as they turn and pass directly over it, Lawrence swears he can see two people exit the car and start to walk toward the gate with something terrifyingly familiar in their hands but then Adam starts to follow the road they had used to get there only moments before and it’s all left behind.

 

— — —

 

The Atmosphere Border is just one of thousands and this one takes up almost five miles of airspace and looks more like the front entrance to a prison with the rest of the sky behind it instead of a building with barred windows. Six small buildings attached together float side-by-side, some with space wide enough for a dinosaur-sized cargo ship, others just barely large enough to fit a two-seater sports cruiser. Heavy gates block each exit of the narrow paths and tiny shuttles keep track of the lines, drifting back and forth, lights flashing on their roofs. A Nebula freighter pulls in behind an Omnibeam tanker and accidentally bumps into it, rocking it slightly and a shuttle pulls up beside it as if waiting to diffuse an oncoming situation but nothing seems to come of it and it slowly wanders away.

Adam pulls in behind a shapely cruiser, the chrome paint reflecting what little sun the clouds were allowing through and Lawrence cranes his neck to see at least five other ships ahead of them. They were all still in the cockpit—minus Peake, who had said something about going to check a part of the ship that was acting up and Lawrence had eyed Adam when he said it but he didn’t seem all too concerned. Bruce has placed himself in the second chair beside Adam, swiveling it, hands behind his head while Lawrence remained standing between them, shifting from one foot to the other.

He was surprised to find that he didn’t feel any worse than he usually did; his brain wasn’t exploding, nothing was malfunctioning—neither him nor the ship itself. His head hadn’t even started to ache yet (even though he could feel it coming, because he almost always could sense it, just on the edge, tapping at the back of his skull, biding it’s time). The worst of it was that, since he didn’t have the intense pain to distract him, he was more aware of how the rest of him felt, of the heaviness inside his torso where all the new and extra pieces had been shoved in. He puts a hand on where he figures one of the machines is and sighs.

“Oh for—” Adam groans, drops his head slightly and rubs a hand over his face.

“What is it?” Bruce stops spinning, faces Adam, lowers his hands to clutch the arms and Adam gestures at the screen in front of him and then out the window.

“Some idiot got themselves stuck ahead of us. This line isn’t going anywhere until they fix it or get a tow out of there.”

“How do you know?” Lawrence asks and Adam points at the screen again, underlines a line of text with his index finger and Lawrence leans forward to read it.

 

> _ATMO BORDER UPDATE: 7:45. CLASS B CRUISER STALLED AT GATE FIVE. AWAITING SERVICE. DELAYS EXPECTED FOR: (TBA) MINUTES._

Lawrence chews on his bottom lip and Adam has his face in his hands again until Bruce reaches over to hit him on the upper arm with the back of his hand. He uncovers himself, looks at Bruce and then follows where he’s pointing over to where a shuttle is flashing an orange arrow over its front window. Adam checks the screen again, reads a new stretch of words that had only just popped up above the previous update: 

 

> _ATMO BORDER UPDATE: 7:47. GATE FOUR HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY OPENED. ALL VEHICLES AT GATE FIVE MAY USE GATE FOUR UNTIL SITUATION HAS BEEN RESOLVED._

It’s as if all four ships read the update at the exact same time because they start to turn together and, for one horrifying minute, Lawrence thinks he’s about to be a part of a multi-ship pileup but they seem to correct themselves and stop, slowly maneuvering to fall into place in the same line they had been in moments before, the ship in front leading the rest to the fourth gate a few feet away and, as they move, Lawrence gets a brief glimpse of a cruiser just slightly bigger than Adam’s still floating but completely stationary.

“I feel kind of bad for them,” Bruce says as they watch a shuttle with amber lights start to make it’s way over to the stalled ship. It passes a little too closely to Adam’s ship as it goes by, the side dangerously close to scratching the hull and Adam mumbles something about the Border’s severely lax attitude about who they hire as shuttle pilots.

“At least they’re still in the air,” Adam says. “I was here one time when a ship’s engines just completely cut out. Everyone just sat there and watched it drop like a brick.”

“Holy shit,” Lawrence says.

“No kidding,” Adam says, settling himself onto the back of the new line. This one was moving much faster (especially more so than the cargo and freighter gates at the other end) and after only fifteen more minutes of waiting, they were next up and Lawrence didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he felt his chest start to hurt. He let’s it out slowly, both he and Bruce watching as Adam takes out a metal rectangle the size of a business card and holds it up flat against the part of the window facing the floating terminal. A woman in a navy blue uniform stands inside and even from here Lawrence can tell she looks tired, as if she had been on break or just about to go home before she had to be dragged back out here because of some moron with a bad engine. She holds up a device slightly bigger than the palm of her hand against her own window, lines it up with Adam’s license and holds down a button. Ten seconds pass and then twenty. She pulls the device away, looks to a screen on a desk in her booth and frowns.

Lawrence makes a fist with one hand, drums the fingers from his other on the knuckles but stops when someone grabs his arm with the moving fingers, looks down to see it’s Bruce who then pats Lawrence on the forearm where he had put his hand before pulling away. _Calm the fuck down. She can see you. Be cool._

The woman puts her device against her window once more, signals for Adam to adjust his license, move it up just a bit, tilt it a little. Another ten seconds, another twenty and Lawrence watches her sigh and shake her head, dropping her arm from the window and offering them a shrug as a way of an apology before jamming her hand against a giant black button on the side of the wall just behind her.

The gate opens slowly and, without another moment of hesitation, Adam moves forward through the newly made opening and flies away.

 

— — —

 

Adam tells them that, for an hour at least, there wasn’t going to be much to look at until they reached the black ( _the black_ , apparently, was his term for space, the same way Bruce had called it _out there_ ), and after that, he could basically put it on auto-pilot ( _I probably won’t, though_ , he had said, _at least not for a little while_ and then, more to himself than the others: _it’s been too long_. Lawrence figures that he means it’s been awhile since he’s flown like this, on his own (in a sense) and in his ship, not taking orders from someone or taking care of company property that most likely took care of _itself_ ninety percent of the time).

Lawrence follows Bruce out of the cockpit, the door sliding quietly shut behind them and they climb down a short set of stairs to open another door directly across from them that revealed—for the first time in Lawrence’s case—the rest of the ship. There are only three floors and Bruce and Lawrence were standing just in the wide doorway of an entirely open space that appeared to function as both a general living area and also a place to sleep. Along the left side and in the center were chairs, a couch, and a table that looked to have been welded together with scrap metal and to the right were three bunk beds bolted to the wall. They didn’t look very comfortable but, then again, they most likely weren’t designed with comfort as the top priority. The bottom bed of the bunk furthest from the door looks to have been claimed already and Lawrence assumes Peake must have chosen it because of how close it was to a person-sized hatch in the floor that probably led down to the engine and the rest of the inner workings of the ship.

“Up there,” Bruce says, points at the low ceiling above them and then at a ladder at far corner of the area, “Is where the kitchen is. Or what resembles a kitchen. Also a few empty rooms. Sort of empty. There’s a ping pong table in one of them. Another one has this great window...” he puts his hands palm-out, side-by-side, thumbs touching and then pulls his hands apart. “Man, I’ve missed this junky little cruiser.” He starts walking towards the ladder but then stops, turns back around when he realizes that Lawrence isn’t following. “You comin’?”

“Nah. I— I’m good.”

“Suit yourself,” Bruce says and, just as his feet disappear up through the hatch in the ceiling, Peake comes up through the one in the floor, as if he had been waiting for Bruce to leave (or if he just had really impeccable timing). He hesitates when he sees Lawrence but doesn’t look perturbed to see him there and Lawrence is about to say something (what, he has no idea—he never really does) when a sudden, sharp pain hits him like a spike directly through his forehead.

“Ah, _fuck_ ,” he curses, hunches over, puts a hand to his head, stumbles slightly but manages to maintain his balance, feet clanging on the metal floor.

“Dude, you okay?” He hears Peake ask as he walks closer but, just as quickly as it had hit him, it disappears and he blinks against the low lights, rubs at his watering eyes to clear them.

“Yeah… I— My head just—” It happens again, feels like he’s being zapped by electricity from underneath his skull and this time it takes just a couple seconds longer to clear. “Shit. What _the fuck_.”

“You wanna sit or something?”

“No, I just— I just need a minute.”

“Okay,” Peake says and Lawrence figures he’s going to back off or maybe leave entirely but he remains hovering just by Lawrence’s elbow. What the hell had happened? What could have possibly— _Something wasn’t working right. Peake had gone to fix it and he must have— Whatever it was, it was fucking with his mechanics. That had to be it._

“What did you do?” 

“Huh?”

“You said you had to fix something and you— What was it?”

“Oh,” Peake says, “Uh, there’s this little computer… this section that helps regulate the airflow in here and it was giving false readings, saying that we were low one minute, suffocating, and way too high the next. I had to open it up, replace a couple wires. That’s all.” _That was all?_ There was no way a small computer that took readings of the oxygen levels was making his head feel like someone was ramming an ice pick right between his eyes. Something like that had only one job to do and it was doing it nestled amongst machinery under a thick layer of metal. Lawrence’s home computer was more powerful than that gadget somewhere under his feet and being in the same room as that never hurt him like this—sure, there were the vision problems, the whining in the back of his head, but it wasn’t whatever he just experienced. It had to be something else but there was no real way he could think of to even begin to figure out what the hell that was.

At least now the sudden punches of it seemed to have stopped, had morphed into just another one of his excruciating headaches.

“If I was one-hundred percent robot, I could just plug myself into a console or open myself up and really see what the hell is going on in there. Instead I’m just… _this_ ,” Lawrence says, doesn’t realize he’s said it out loud until he hears Peake ask:

“Human?”

“Right,” Lawrence says after a pause that even a person both deaf and blind would find suspicious, “Nothing but meat.”

“Sure,” Peake says. “Hey, look, are you gonna be alright? Because there’s some other stuff I need to check on but if you want me to hang out—”

“No,” Lawrence says, “I think I’ll pick out a bed and then just… I don’t know. I’ll be okay.”

“You got it,” Peake says and walks off towards the same ladder that Bruce had climbed up a few minutes ago, disappears up onto the floor above and Lawrence wanders over to where he had dropped his bag, climbs to the top bed over the one that had already been claimed—it was awkward and he had to hunch his shoulders a bit to fit there, but he’d never gotten to sleep on a bunk bed before and the novelty of it was still somehow charming to him even though he wasn’t a kid anymore—and starts rummaging through, finds the pain pills he knew he had thrown in there but he grimaces when he opens the bottle to find that there were less than ten left.

“I don’t even know why I’m still taking these,” he says to himself but swallows two anyway. It’s a habit at this point or maybe there’s some sad part of him that thinks maybe this time they’ll actually do what they were made for. “I need a drink.” He thinks about going to find one, figures that there had to be a bottle of _something_ stashed on board but he changes his mind and leans back against the cold wall instead, feels the rumble of the ship against his shoulders, puts himself in a sort of in-between state, turns his brain down to about half-power. Almost immediately, the pain stops and, for a little while, everything feels like it did before he volunteered for any of this.

He’d stay like this forever if he could get away with it but having your brain only working half-way (or less than half, as it did when he was ‘sleeping’) wasn’t nearly practical. Everything hurt a lot less, but sounds were muffled, his reaction time was slower (or completely non-existent; someone could walk over and start using him as a punching bag and he’d be aware of it, he’d know what was happening but he wouldn’t be able to stop it unless he ramped his power back up to one-hundred) and he couldn’t see (at fifty percent, he could still find shadows and shapes, notice movement as if he were sitting in a room with dim lights, a few layers of gauze wrapped around his eyes; anything lower than that and it was nothing but black but it didn’t matter because he couldn’t process thought much at that point either).

Lawrence isn’t sure how long he sits there like that (time has a way of tricking him when he’s in this state if he’s not careful, it’s why he had to set an alarm which, of course, was the one thing he forgot to bring—he was going to have to sleep with his brain ramped up much higher than he usually had it when he put himself out because—unless he wanted to tell one of the people on board with him about what was really going on so they could wake him—he ran the dangerous risk of turning his brain down for a nap and accidentally staying that way for three days, although he’d like to think that someone would try to bring him back anyway before it got that bad). He doesn’t notice time passing but, at some point, he’s cognizant of a shadow somewhere below him and the dampened sounds of someone talking.

He turns everything back on: his vision, his hearing, his body, and, unfortunately, the pain. The room is clear, the lights brighter, and he blinks a few times, stares down at Adam who’s looking up at him, seems to be waiting for an answer to a question he must have asked.

“What?” Lawrence asks, rubs at a spot on his forehead. It’s not as bad as it was, but it still hurts.

“What do you mean ‘what’? You didn’t hear any of that?” Adam asks, and his brows furrow slightly. “You were looking _right_ at me.”

“I was?” His question gets him a strange look in response. “Sorry. I kind of zone out sometimes. What’s up?”

“We’re here,” he says, and then clarifies: “In space, I mean. You can check it out if you want.” He backs up slightly to give Lawrence room to descend the short ladder and turn around and he keeps his arms close to his sides when he shrugs, only moves his shoulders. “There’s a window on the floor above this one… it’s pretty decent. Not as big as the cockpit but it’s nicer somehow. I think looking at the stars coming straight at you makes a lot of people dizzy. This one, you're kind of of…” He lays his hand flat, moves it sideways, parallel to his chest.

“Bruce mentioned that,” Lawrence says, keeps up with Adam’s slow pace as he walks to the ladder in the corner of the room where he had watched both Bruce and Peake ascend what he figures was about an hour or so earlier.

“I figured,” Adam sighs, stops part of the way, the center of his feet balanced on a rung, one arm hooked around another as he reaches up to push the hatch open.

“He also said you had a ping pong table,” Lawrence says from behind him, doesn’t start climbing until Adam was already mostly through the now open entryway.

“I got rid of that thing awhile ago,” Lawrence hears Adam say as he pops his head up through the hole to reveal a slightly narrow hallway with a sharp right turn at the other end, a few closed doors on either side, another sealed shut straight ahead. Tubes of light stretch in the angle where wall meets floor and Lawrence pulls himself the rest of the way up, finds that Adam had actually waited for him and he gestures ahead of them as if he wants Lawrence to lead the way.

Their feet clank along on the metal floor and Adam stops at the last door before the turn down towards another hallway.

“Here we go,” he says, leans on the panel installed in the wall and the door slides open to reveal a window that takes up nearly the entire length and width of the wall right across from the doorway and Lawrence takes a couple steps into the room before staggering backwards. When the public was finally allowed to be out here, the internet was flooded with video of people’s vacations—shaky phone cameras capturing what they saw through their tour vessel’s windows—and professionals hooking thousand dollar recording devices to the outside of their tiny ships to capture a trip to a moon and back again. Lawrence had watched a lot of them but found he preferred the five hour time lapse ones overlaid with music; he’d put them on in the background while he did other things, would only get distracted a few times, staring at the pitch black, the stars and the occasional asteroid that floated by, bumps and ridges drifting amongst the frigid air and hot gas and he’d resigned himself to the fact that this was the closest he was probably going to get to being there himself.

But now here he was, in the black or out there or however else someone wanted to put it and it’s so suddenly and overwhelmingly clear that—despite the excellent quality of the videos he had watched—they didn’t nearly do the real thing even a minute amount of justice. They’re moving fast enough that the stars look more like short lines streaking across the sky but he can still pick out almost each individual one as they blow past them. It isn’t that, though, which has him lose his footing, has his organic stomach drop, his mechanical heart race just for a few seconds before it regulates itself: it’s the pitch-dark _between_ those stars, the nothingness that keeps going, extends forever. There’s no place like there would be on a beach, standing on the sand and gazing out to where ocean met sky. There’s no visible horizon. It’s just dark.

“I need to—” Lawrence starts to say and then abruptly turns to walk back out into the hallway and he leans beside the door, takes in a few deep breaths.

“That happens a lot more often than you think,” Adam says to him from the doorway. “Bruce threw up the first time. Peake’s the only person I’ve known who apparently didn’t lose it a little the first time but… well, he’s Peake.” He pauses for a moment. “You wanna go back in?”

“Sure,” Lawrence says and it’s already not quite as bad the second time around. His mouth is still dry, his stomach just slightly queasy and he takes a few steps closer to the window and then a few more until his breath is fogging the glass. He leans forward slightly on his toes and stares down, sees more nothingness underneath them and his head spins. “Whoa, okay.” He moves away, back towards the center of the small room and shakes his head, puts a hand up as if someone was trying to convince him to do it again. “That was a bad idea.” Adam actually laughs at him but it’s brief and, eventually, it’s just the two of them in silence, staring out a giant window into the void.

 

— — —

 

Adam shows him the rest of the ship after that: the kitchen and dining area with one long cafeteria table in the middle, a few cabinets and a space to heat up the types of meals that came in bags and coffee that came in flexible bulbs that got hot when you cracked and shook them (Lawrence had tried both before, just for the hell of it, and they were awful—the food was soft and bland, the coffee strong sludge—and he had told himself _never again_ but he supposes there were some promises made to yourself that you just can’t keep), a room filled with junk and old computer parts ( _I don’t remember why this is here_ , Adam had said when he opened the door, says it as if he’s not sure why he was showing it to Lawrence either, or like he had thought there was something else in there entirely), and, finally, a fairly large space where Bruce was currently playing around with a gaming system. 

“This definitely wasn’t here the last time I was,” Bruce says, taking the headset off as soon as he sees Adam walk in. There’s an obelisk-like console in the corner with three controllers and two other headsets resting on the floor, a decently-sized screen mounted high on the wall, a couch with sagging cushions and a questionable stain pushed back enough to make room for people to move around.

“You can thank Shooting Star,” Adam tells him, “They paid for it. There’s not a lot on there though and it’s all local. They still haven’t quite figured out how to make it so you can play with someone back home or on another ship while you’re floating around out here.” Bruce shrugs, tucks the headset under his arm.

“At least it’s not a ping pong table. There’s only so many hours you can bounce a virtual ball back and forth with someone before you start to lose your mind. Did you show him the view?” Bruce asks next, points at Lawrence and Adam nods. “Did he—”

“He didn’t throw up,” Adam says, interrupting him. “You’re the only one who has ever thrown up, Bruce.” Bruce frowns.

Lawrence walks over to the console while they talk, crouches down to examine it. It was made by Unit Pi—not a bad company, definitely not as good as Xeno Circuit—and the model was two years old but they were made to last and could survive nearly anything (one of the selling points shown in a video when it was first announced was the CEO throwing the console off a five story building and then playing one of their flagship games on it a few minutes later).

“You know there’s this trick you can do with the Colossus to bump up the RAM,” Lawrence says, can’t help himself.

“I know,” Adam replies. “But you can’t do it from up here. You need a cable to—”

“Nah,” Lawrence says, sits cross-legged in front of the machine, rotates it to pull a panel off at the back. “Someone told you that but they were wrong. I mean, not wrong, exactly. You can use a cable but it’s only temporary. There’s a thing that’ll make it permanent, goes right in here.” He points at an empty slot, taps at it. “See?”

“Do you have one?” Adam asks.

“Well, no,” Lawrence admits, “But they’re cheap if you can find them. Cheap-ish. You know, for next time.”

“Next time?” There’s a raised eyebrow that comes with that question and Lawrence feels his face go warm.

“I mean, it won’t matter to me much since I won’t be here, but for whenever you fly again. You must have figured you would or you wouldn’t have put this stuff in here, right? If you thought it would just sit in the hangar forever… I’m just saying. It’s a better experience,” he says, locks the panel back into place and clears his throat from his spot on the floor.

“Here,” Bruce says after a few seconds of shared awkward silence, and tosses the headset he was holding at Lawrence, who catches it, and then bends down to pick up one of the others for himself, “He’s got _Storm Breed 2_.”

“I love that game,” Lawrence says as he stands, listens to the sound of the Colossus turning on, the screen flashing the animated green logo. He fits the headset over his head, adjusts it, pushes the button on the back to turn it on and he feels his body go numb before everything shuts down and, for one long and horrifying moment, he can’t see, he can’t hear, he can’t speak. He can work his arms somehow but they don’t feel like they’re a part of him, they move on a two second delay, his brain telling them to lift and there’s a slight pause before they actually _do it_. He reaches up, puts his hands to where he thinks his own head is, where the headset was, and tries to take it off but he can’t get a good grip on the edges of it because he can’t feel them.

All at once, though, the world comes crashing back. It’s not like when he’s shut off part of his brain—this is almost violent in how it happens and he yelps. The room slams into view, the noises of the ship curl into his ears. Bruce has his own headset pushed back off his eyes, the one Lawrence had been wearing clutched in his hands and both he and Adam are staring at him, somehow looking both concerned and slightly afraid.

“Is there anything I can tell you about what just happened that either of you would actually believe?” Lawrence asks. _They never told me that I couldn’t— But of course not. They probably figured I was smart enough to put that one together myself._

“Not really,” Adam says. Lawrence has no idea exactly what they saw; for all he knew, he had put the headset on, fallen deathly silent and then tried to remove it in a panic but, judging by the looks on their faces, he highly doubted that was it. “But you paid me not to ask, so I won’t. I’m heading back down,” he says after that, gives Bruce a half-hearted salute as a goodbye and walks away.

“I could still ask you since you haven’t paid me not to,” Bruce says but then exhales slowly. “But I won’t either. So no headsets.” He take his own off, picks up the controllers instead, hands one to Lawrence. “Adam’s got _Deadcell_ , too. I like that better than _Storm Breed_ anyway.”

They sit down and start to play.

 

— — —

 

It’s like this mostly for the next three days: Lawrence and Bruce play games to pass the time, even though Lawrence can only sit and play for a short period of time before he needs to step away for at least thirty minutes to clear his head. Adam joins them occasionally, Peake only twice. The four of them eat their meals together, talk about nonsense or don’t talk at all, and spend their evenings on their own.

The intense hammering of pain to Lawrence’s head attacks him each time he goes down to the space on the second floor so he avoids it the best he can, only uses it when he wants to shut down for awhile and he lies down even though he doesn’t have to, does it to convince the others that he’s sleeping like a normal person, just like they are.

There’s an out-of-place, dented cabinet in the dining area that Lawrence manages to find on his own while he’s taking a break from watching Bruce attempt to get through one of the last levels of _Deadcell_ and he opens it to find four, full bottles of vodka. He takes one, hides it at the bottom of his duffel bag and waits for someone to mention it before he cracks it open and starts drinking but nobody ever does. It’s cheap but it does the job, which is all he could really ask for.

Bruce talks to him the most out of three others on board but Adam tells Lawrence stories at breakfast about working at Shooting Star and the awful people he had to shuttle around and he doesn’t complain if Lawrence sits down with him in the cockpit for a little while (neither of them really needed to be there; the ship flies itself and there was a perfectly adequate window a floor above them but Lawrence knew they both had their own reasons for being there instead).

He learns that Adam hadn’t been lying when he said that Lawrence wouldn’t know that Peake was there most of the time. He had a remarkable habit of disappearing for hours only to reappear suddenly, standing in the room as if he had been there the entire time and you only just noticed him because he made a noise.

By the middle of the third day, Lawrence realizes that he hasn’t nodded off since he got on the ship, hasn’t lost any time and wonders if he’s just been having a good week or if there was something about his apartment that was causing it. _If these symptoms are on purpose, are manufactured_ , says a voice in his head, _then what else could they have been doing? Think about it._ He doesn’t _want_ to think about but he finds it’s difficult not to.

He’s surprised, too, that he hasn’t heard anything from ExoBio. Nobody has tried to contact them, no police cruisers had surrounded the ship as soon as they passed through the border. The last he had seen of them was the black car parked outside the hangar before they left (he knows it was them, _he knows_ ) and, since then, it’s been radio silence. Maybe it was like how it was when Bruce walked off with that gun after Shooting Star let him go: as long as there’s no news about it, it’s an acceptable loss.

A part of him laughs at that, though; a gun is a lot different than millions of dollars worth of technology built into a human being. He’s their only test subject as far as he knows (there could be more, other mostly mechanical bodies in other cities or even right next door), he wasn’t something they would just let walk away. Even if they don’t know _where_ he’s going, they still must know that he’s left. Sooner or later they would have to come for him and Lawrence hopes that they take at least a long time to catch up.

 

— — —

 

It’s the fourth day of the trip and Lawrence is sitting in the cockpit with Adam when the display in front of him starts to beep, an image of the outside popping onto the screen, a bright blue light blinking amongst the digital stars.

“Huh,” Adam grunts.

“What is it?” Lawrence questions, leaning sideways to get a better look at the screen. 

“There’s a ship out there.” Adam starts to decelerate, little by little, until he comes to a complete stop and Lawrence is about to ask where it exactly is but there, just in the distance, he sees a cruiser floating, unmoving, as if someone had pressed a button on a giant remote and paused it. They’re not close enough to be able to see much else other than the fact that it exists and Adam turns slightly in his chair, swipes up on one of the screens in front of him. “Hey, guys,” Adam says and he’s talking to Bruce and Peake, wherever they are on the ship. “I think you should come up here. You need to see this.”

“What’s it doing?” Bruce asks once the four of them are in the same room.

“Nothing,” Adam says, as if he can’t believe he has to tell him that.

“Are they asking for help?” Peake asks next and Adam checks something, brings up a new window on a screen and shrugs.

“I’m not getting anything.” He pauses, frowns. “I mean, why’re they all the way out here? I specifically told the ship to choose the path with the least amount of traffic and even then…” He shrugs again, lifts a hand palm up. “Fyto’s the only planet with people on it out here and it isn’t exactly a primo destination, you know? The fact that _we’re_ going there is strange enough…” Adam starts moving the ship again, inching further towards it to get a better look. It’s a cruiser similar to the one they’re standing in, except this one isn’t nearly as boxy as Adam’s, it’s edges more rounded, the windows circular instead of square. There are lights on in a few of them, the others completely dark and, while they _had_ gotten closer, they still couldn’t make out the name which was painted on in white block letters on the side of the ship facing their front window. And yet…

“It looks familiar,” Lawrence says, more to himself than anybody else there. “Why does it look familiar?”

“Hang on,” Adam says, “They _are_ sending out a message. The signal’s just incredibly weak. A ship that new, they’d have to be doing that on purpose. Let me just…” He moves their ship again, just enough so that whatever was being sent out into the ether could actually be read. “Their ship is stuck. Won’t fly. Says they’ve been there for at least twelve hours.” He sits back, drums his fingers on the arm of his chair.

“We should help them,” Peake says and Bruce points at him when he says it, nods.

“He’s right. We gotta help. At least talk to them.”

“They’ve probably seen us by now, anyway. Be kind of a dick move to stop and then just leave,” Lawrence pipes in. “I really do think I’ve seen this ship before, though. But I can’t—” He closes his eyes briefly, tries to picture it but nothing is coming, it’s just a stupid feeling he has. He’d probably seen the model before somewhere, maybe in a television show or a movie. Didn’t Mose Yates drive one in _District Black_? He hadn’t seen that movie since he was in his early twenties but the type of ship some fictional space gunslinger flew around was exactly the type of stupid, useless trivia that Lawrence carried around with him.

“It could be a trap,” Adam is saying, “Lure us in with a distress signal and then—”

“Oh, come on,” Bruce asks, laughing, “Out here? Who’re they waiting to lure in? We’re the only other people out here!” When he says that, a crawling feeling goes up Lawrence’s spine that makes his shoulders shiver slightly. He blinks, turns to look out the side of the window further to the right. _Maybe_... he starts to think. It’s ridiculous, he knows, to even be considering that—they would have to had left three days before Lawrence and the rest of them did, would have to be able to predict that this was the route they would take to get here. It was possible—because, really, everything is at least a little bit possible—but also doubtful. It still didn’t give him any sort of comfort.

“Maybe they know what Lawrence is delivering to Fyto,” Adam says.

“ _We_ don’t even know what Lawrence is delivering to Fyto,” Bruce says, “What the hell makes you think some pirates would?”

“I didn’t say they were pirates,” Adam corrects him but then exhales slowly, turns to look at Peake, who had been standing behind his chair, saying nothing else. “You really think we should help them?”

“I really do,” Peake says.

“Alright,” Adam says, turns back to face front and steers the ship the rest of the way over, pulling alongside the new vessel. From here, they can clearly see the name—SC _Benson_. Lawrence narrows his eyes, tilts his head, studies the shape and that’s when it hits him.

“Oh my god,” Lawrence says, “It’s them.”

“‘Them’?” Adam asks. “Who’s them?”

“Them,” Lawrence says, points at the ship. “The— The guys at the border. The ones who held up the line. Who got stuck. I _knew_ I recognized their ship!”

“Are you sure?” Bruce questions. “How the hell did they get here before we did?" 

“I don’t know,” Adam says, starts moving things around on a screen in front of him. “Let’s find out.” An image of a broadcasting signal, curved rays stretching out, falling back, stretching out, shows on the screen. “Hello?” He raises his voice slightly. “This is the SS _Reaper_ —” It’s the first time that Lawrence has actually heard Adam say the name of his own ship (it wasn’t painted on the side or, at least, nowhere that Lawrence might have seen it when he saw the ship sitting in the hangar those few days ago) and it certainly wasn’t what he was expecting. “—We’re getting your message. Anybody home?”

“Oh my god,” a female voice replies after about twenty seconds. “I told you,” she says and it takes them all a second to realize that she’s not talking to them. “I fucking told you someone would find us! Hi, sorry,” she’s talking to them this time instead of whomever is with her and she sounds out of breath, as if she had sprinted to wherever she was answering them from. “I just— James was so sure we were going to run out of fuel before anybody else flew by which, you know, is impossible because we’re practically swimming in it but whatever. He was wrong so…” She trails off and they hear what must have been the person she was talking to laugh.

“That’s just impolite,” the other person says and Lawrence figures that one must be James, and he resolves that one quickly by introducing himself soon after speaking. “And that was Elyse you were talking to,” he tells them.

“Yo,” she says.

“What’re you guys doing out here?” Adam asks after telling them everyone’s names and there’s a lengthy pause from the other end of the line before James finally responds with a question of his own:

“You don’t work for the government or anything do you?”

“No government I know of sends people flying around in buckets like that,” Elyse says to James and then, to Adam: “No offense.” 

“None taken,” Adam says, “I guess? But to answer your question: no, we don’t.”

“Then to answer _your_ question:” James says, accepting their answer with a surprising lack of hesitation, “We’re just taking a trip of sorts.”

“That’s the over-simplified version,” Elyse says.

“That’s the _only_ version,” James says. “There’s no— We don’t have to tell them our life story here.”

“Chill,” Elyse says to him and addresses Adam again: “Yeah, so anything you guys can do to help us out here would be great.”

“Ask them what went wrong. Like what happened exactly,” Peake says, not quite loud enough for James and Elyse to hear and Adam gestures at the display but Peake shrugs with one hand at him.

“What happened? Can you… I don’t know… explain the problem?” Adam asks.

“It’s kind of— It’s—” Elyse starts, pauses, sighs, “We’re flying and everything is fine, everything’s working and then the ship just… stops.”

“Does it—” Peake looks to Adam, starts to ask but Adam reaches over and grabs his elbow, directs him towards the display in front of him and Peake frowns very slightly for the briefest of moments. “Does—” He tries to start again, this time just a little louder. “Does it slow down and then stop or just goes suddenly dead?”

“The second one,” James says, “Definitely the second one.” There’s a moment of uncertainty as if he’s waiting to Elyse to confirm.

“No, yeah,” Elyse chimes in, “he’s right. It’s the second one.”

“This happened before at the border,” James tells them, starts to say something else but Bruce interrupts.

“Yeah, we remember you guys.”

“You’re kidding,” Elyse says.

“We were about five ships behind you,” Adam says. “And yet you managed to get out here before we did.”

“We made some mods,” James says, but then corrects himself: “ _Elyse_ made some mods. We can get this thing going pretty fast when we want it to. Like I was saying, though: a guy in a shuttle came to fix us up, worked on this ship for about ten minutes before saying we were good to go. And we were until… well. Until we fuckin’ weren’t.”

“You think it’s whatever they did to their ship?” Adam asks Peake, referring to the mods that that they had mentioned.

“If it is,” Elyse says, over-hearing him, “We’re fucked. I don’t think this ship’ll run properly if we have to undo everything that’s goin’ on in here now.”

“Nah,” Peake says, leaning forward over the display to get a better look out the window before falling back, flat on his feet again. He crosses an arm over his chest, taps his bottom lip with the index finger on his other hand. “I think I know what the problem is. The guy at the border did, too, I guess but it was probably a temporary fix. Guys like that, they just want to get you out of their hair, you know? It’s not their fault, though, it’s the guys they work for.”

“So, wait,” Elyse says. “Can you fix it? Is it fixable?”

“Sure,” Peake says after another minor pause. “It’d take me about twenty, twenty-five minutes with the right tools. It is a problem on the outside of their ship, though.”

“Do you still have a suit?” Bruce asks Adam.

“Yeah, I think it’s around here somewhere.”

“You guys are lifesavers. Seriously.” James says, “I guess we’ll just… hang out here until you’re finished, then.”

“Let us know if you need anything,” Elyse says. “Tools or snacks or whatever.”

“Snacks, Elyse?” James asks her, incredulous.

“I don’t know why I said that. It just… came out.”

“Snacks,” James repeats, laughing.

“We, uh, we’ll… We’ll let you—” Adam tries to say as the two of them continue their back-and-forth, but he gives up when they’re obviously not listening and ends the connection.

 

— — —

 

Adam has the four of them split up to search the ship for its sole spacesuit ( _I know it’s on board_ , Adam had said, _I just can’t remember for the life of me where I stored it_ ) and Lawrence winds up finding it in a rusted foot locker shoved under a pile of old, lightweight engine parts in the junk room that Adam had showed him while giving a brisk tour of the ship when Lawrence had been there his first day. 

He considers lugging the entire box with him but there was no way he would possibly be able to shove it down the ladder without breaking something—or _someone_ —so he removes the suit, bundles the bulky brown fabric in his arms before realizing he needed his hands to climb and instead drapes it across his back, the empty arms hanging over his chest, the machinery that protruded from the fabric bumping against him as he moved. He tucks the detachable gloves into the waist of his pants and then he’s left with the heaviest pieces: the boots and the helmet.

The helmet barely fits through the hole between the floors and Bruce laughs at him when he sees him.

“I only have two arms!” Lawrence says crossly, his voice muffled somewhat underneath the helmet, his feet making an ungodly sound against the metal floor as he stomps towards the cockpit where the others were waiting.

 

— — —

 

“You’re sure about this,” Adam says to Peake, who’s got everything but the helmet on. There’s a heavy toolbox sitting at his feet with magnets attached to the bottom that could stick to the side of their ship when activated and a length of cord about as thick as Lawrence’s arm has been screwed into a wide plug in the back of the suit, the other end waiting to be screwed into another plug just outside the cockpit door, in the space between there and the door to the rest of the inside of the ship.

“Twenty-five minutes max,” Peake replies.

“Okay,” Adam says, puts his helmet on for him, twists it to make sure it’s tight and then walks over to the wide display under the front window, points to one of the screens. “We’ll be able to talk to you and you can talk to us.” He points to his own ear and Peake fumbles with a switch on a small box just to the right of his chest, even though Lawrence feels like that was something he shouldn’t need to be told.

“Got it,” he says and his voice is doubled, echos through the cockpit. He crouches awkwardly to pick up the toolbox with one hand and lift the cord with the other, dragging it alongside him as he walks to the first door. It doesn’t look nearly long enough to be able to reach the _Benson_ but Lawrence had seen these before and knew that they could stretch out to twice their resting length without breaking (he was really sick once, awake at three in the morning and he was so dazed and bleary-eyed that he’d found himself watching an hour and a half of an infomercial for a non-military, family-safe approved version; eventually he had fallen asleep but he woke up the next afternoon with a package on his doorstep and a box of Protracteron that he had no idea what to do with).

“I’ll screw this in for you,” Adam says, gestures to the cord, “But you’ll have to let yourself out since I’m not really interested in being sucked out into space today.” He opens the door to the tight area just outside where they were, walks into it with Peake and Bruce slides the rest of the cord out towards them. Lawrence watches from the doorway as Adam screws it into a hole just opposite the door leading outside. “You—” Adam begins but Peake bumps into him. 

“I’ve done this before,” he says and Lawrence can see his mouth moving but his voice comes out of the speakers on the ship and it’s mildly disconcerting. Adam puts a hand, palm up at him and then extends the arm towards the door before turning back towards the cockpit. Peake waves as they close the door behind them.

A minute passes and then two and then:

“Okay,” Peake says and his voice is surprisingly clear. Lawrence would think he was standing right next to him if it wasn’t so loud. “I’m out.”

“We see you,” Adam says and Lawrence looks out the window to indeed see Peake connected to what could almost be described now as an umbilical cord, drifting slowly towards James and Elyse’s ship. He twists, does a somersault and he isn’t sure if that was just what happened or he had done it on purpose. He’s halfway there when they watch him grab the cord with his free hand to stop himself from moving forward.

“Hey, guys,” he says, waits for someone to acknowledge that they could still hear him before continuing and he sounds concerned. “There’s something weird attached to our ship.”

“To _our_ ship?” Adam asks.

“Yeah. It— It looks like a black box. It’s got a flashing red light on it.” Peake pulls himself back a bit, floats slightly downward but stops himself before he goes too far. “It wasn’t there when we left the hangar.” Adam turns to look at the other two; Bruce shrugs and Lawrence shakes his head but, internally, he feels his stomach start to twist into an impressively tight knot. “I’m gonna fix their ship first. I’ll check it out before I come back inside.” He lets go of the cord and advances on the _Benson_ once more. When he gets there, he grabs a piece of the ship that’s sticking out far enough for him to curl his thick fingers around and he steadies himself, moves towards the left before stopping at a specific spot and then lifts his toolbox, tilting it so the bottom faced the ship and slams it against the hull before doing the same with his knees. ( _Magnets in the pads_ , Adam had explained. This was an older suit, Lawrence figured. They didn’t use magnets much anymore these days.)

Peake grasps his hands around the edges of a square piece of the hull and wrenches it open, reveals a mess of wires and machinery. After that, it’s just a matter of watching him work.

 

— — —

 

Peake’s fitting the panel back on when the shot comes from seemingly absolutely nowhere at all.

It jerks the _Reaper_ forward a few inches with a mess of sparks and smoke and whips Peake along with it and the only reason he doesn’t break his back is because the force is strong enough that it deactivates the magnets in his knees and he goes flying sideways, manages to catch himself on a piece of the _Benson_ ’s hull. Inside the ship, Bruce is the only one still standing and he loses his balance, starts to fall forward but grabs onto the back of Lawrence’s chair.

“What the _fuck_!” Adam yells. “What the—”

“Where did that come from? Where was that?” Bruce asks and Adam stares down at his screen, moves his fingers frantically over a lot of piles of different windows, searching, ending up on the same image that had shown them that James and Elyse’s ship was in the vicinity but all it was showing was the same thing: there was the _Benson_ and there was the _Reaper_ and that was it. “Adam! Where—”

“I don’t know!” Adam yells. “I don’t— Peake! Are you—?”

“I’m alright,” Peake replies.

“Look,” Lawrence says, points at the screen, at a signal trying to tell them that someone was attempting to make a connection. It’s James.

“Are you guys okay?” He asks.

“Can you two— Can you see where that came from?” Adam responds with a question of his own, gets up out of his chair and climbs on the short ledge that the display made at the top, presses himself against the wide window and looks behind them.

“You can’t?” James asks, but then says: “Hold on. I think—” He’s cut off by another shot that hits the back of the _Reaper_ again and the connection to the _Benson_ drops out. Peake lurches again, loses his grip but catches himself for a second time.

“I can’t—” Adam starts to say but then stops when a ship almost the same color as the space they’re hovering in pulls in about fifty feet behind them. It’s sleek, the hull shining and impossibly smooth, thin wings extending tight against its sides. If there were windows, they were hidden well and it was deathly silent. It hangs there, doing nothing, and it’s one of the most intimidating things Lawrence has ever seen. His head is getting worse—he’s used to a near constant, low sort of pain but this is getting almost as bad as when he felt like an icepick was being jammed into his forehead four days ago.

“Why are they only shooting at _us_?” Bruce asks.

 _It’s me_ , Lawrence thinks, _they’re looking for me. They’re not trying to bring me back. They want me dead. I’m an acceptable loss, alright, but they want to be the ones to lose me._

“What are they waiting for?” Adam questions, still sitting on the ledge of the dashboard, his breath fogging the window. Alarms are blaring now, red warnings flashing on every screen on the display, but not a single one of the messages was one letting them know that whoever was in that ship was trying to contact them with a verbal threat or demands.

The ship sends off a third shot, this time sailing a few feet past them and Lawrence figures that was a warning or maybe they just missed until he hears Adam curse and he sees exactly what they had done: the cord that kept Peake attached to the ship—that kept him from floating away—had been neatly severed. Now the only thing keeping him from disappearing off into the void was his grip and a couple magnets in his knees that he seemed to have managed to reactivate.

Adam tries to talk to him but nothing will go through, they’re hit with a fourth shot and, by that point, their own ship had decided that if Adam wasn’t going to lower any shields on his own, it would do it for him and heavy metal armaments start to cover the windows, cutting them off from the outside world. Adam hops down from where he was sitting, throws himself back into his chair and opens a window on one of the screens, brings forward a fuzzy image of a fixed spot outside the ship but it’s only facing straight ahead. It’s enough to be able to see where he’s going, but not enough to help in any other way. The most recent blast had sent Bruce reeling and he falls heavily on his back, the wind knocked out of him and he takes a moment before rolling on his side and dragging himself back on his feet. Lawrence’s hands are sweating, his head spinning. _Say something_ , a voice says, _say something you idiot. Tell them. Tell them why you’re being attacked. Tell them it’s your fault_. He actually opens his mouth but nothing comes out except a weird noise from low in his throat.

“Wait— I think—” Adam slams his fist against a button and suddenly Elyse’s voice is flooding the area. It’s distorted, crackling but they can make out what she’s saying anyway:

“—Run! Get the _fuck_ out of here!” 

“But—” Adam starts and James is the one to cut him off before he can finish.

“Just do it!” James shouts. “Go until you can’t see us anymore and then stop. Stop and wait.”

“We—” Adam tries again and, for a second time, he’s interrupted by the both of them yelling simultaneously:

“Go!” 

Adam goes.

 

— — —

 

Adam flies the ship manually, does as they had said, takes it out until the flashing blue dot that was the _Benson_ on their radar vanishes—not because, hopefully, they were dead, but because the ship couldn’t see that far—and then he slams on the brakes. The ship whines and shudders when he does it and Adam moves a switch, types in a lengthy code. The piercing wail of the alarms stop, the shields lift and Lawrence watches as dark smoke curls up from the back of the ship, as sparks flicker and quickly die without oxygen to turn them into a fire.

“How bad is it?” Bruce asks after a long stretch of silence and Adam rubs his hands over his face, keeps his eyes covered with the palms of his hands for a few seconds. “Adam. Are you—”

“Navigation is shot,” Adam says. “One of the fuel tanks is gone. Not ‘in pieces’. Completely gone. Obliterated. There’s a hole in the hull towards the back. Looks like it’s— We won’t be able to go through the door into the rest of the ship any time soon,” he says, gestures to the door behind him and Lawrence starts to cough, choking on his own saliva when he breathes in too sharply. His bag, everything he brought with him, was now lost to outer space, sucked out into the cold. All he had now were the clothes he was wearing.

“ _Shit_. My gun,” Bruce groans but then blinks, has a look of sudden realization. “Wait. Does that mean—” He turns to Lawrence. “Lawrence… your package. Was it—?” Lawrence found himself balancing on a very precarious beam and he wasn’t sure what to do.

“Uh…” He eventually says and leaves it at that, allows them to interpret that as they will, whether they choose to hear it as him not knowing or him being in such shock at the prospect of losing his package that he can’t speak properly. (That being said, speaking in general was proving incredibly difficult at the moment and he knows it’s something he should be concerned about but he’s too preoccupied by what just happened to spend too much time thinking about it.) 

“Everything else seems mostly superficial,” Adam says, finishing answering Bruce’s original question. Lawrence notices that Adam hadn’t mentioned Peake yet and he wonders if he’s doing it on purpose, trying not to think too hard about it. The last any of them saw of him was him holding on to the side of the other ship, the other ship that had stayed behind and told them to run. Adam rests his arms down on the display, puts his head face-down into them, says something but neither of them can hear it so maybe it wasn’t meant for either of the other people in the room. 

“Hey,” Bruce says suddenly a few minutes later. “Hey.” He taps the back of his hand on Adam’s shoulder, keeps doing it until Adam finally lifts his head and Bruce points out the window. Adam and Lawrence follow his finger and they both see a speck shaped like a ship slowly approaching their location. Adam glances down at the screen he had been laying his head on and there, on the radar, is a flashing blue dot.

The _Benson_ pulls up alongside them a couple minutes after they had noticed their arrival and, other than a few scorch marks, they appear to be perfectly intact. A green message pops on the screen next and Adam sits up, pushes a button and, over the speakers, they hear James says:

“Well, fancy meeting you here.” Lawrence feels a tightness in his chest release, just a little. “Everyone okay?”

“Yeah,” Adam says, “Yeah, we’re all fine. Is— Is Peake—” He swallows and Lawrence watches him close his eyes, his whole body stiffening as if he’s bracing himself for bad news. 

“I’m here,” Peake says and Adam immediately relaxes, pulls fingers through his hair and sits back heavily in his seat.

“Elyse got him inside,” James says. “I got us between you and the ship and just unloaded on them. I don’t think they’ll be coming after you again.”

“I don’t even know why they were shooting at us in the first place,” Adam mutters and then says to James: “Look, we’re sort of trapped in here at the moment. I don’t suppose you have any more tricks up your sleeves to get us out of here, do you?”

“Hm,” James murmurs. “Hang on.” He leaves the connection open and they can hear the ambient noises of someone else’s ship, a faint hum of their engine mingling with the rumble of their own, indistinct voices having a conversation. Then, suddenly, a loud _ca-thunk_ and the ship shifts an inch to the right.

“What the—” Adam starts to say and for a second, Lawrence thinks they were being shot at again—from the looks on the faces of the other two, so did they—but, as they peer out the window, the only thing they see is a heavy metal pole extending from the _Benson_ and right into the hull of their own ship, securing the two of them together.

“Elyse!” James says, “You can’t just— You have to _tell_ them first!” 

“I thought you did!”

“No! I clearly did not!”

“Oh. Well. My bad, then,” Elyse says and then, louder to the others: “My bad. Sorry.”

“Okay, so,” James says, “We’ve got a few suits here. What I’m gonna do is put one on, pack up the rest and drift on over to you. We’ll get you suited up and you guys can come over, hang out with us.”

“Why not. It’s not like we really have any better options,” Adam says, tells him that the door’s already open.

“Brave man, leaving your door unlocked in this neighborhood,” James says. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” He closes down the connection and they’re pushed back into mostly silence, the only sounds of a ship struggling to keep itself running and their own breathing.

A door opens in the side of the _Benson_ and a figure in a pale spacesuit floats out, two heavy bags on each shoulder, and he grabs on to the metal rod connecting their two ships, uses it to pull himself along, bit-by-bit. He disappears out of their line of sight; for a minute or two after that there’s nothing and they’ve already gotten so used to that awkward nothingness, that they all jump when someone knocks on the door just outside of their little room.

Adam and Lawrence both stand up but Bruce is the one who goes to open it, steps aside as the two bags come flying in through the doorway first but nobody comes inside after them. They hear the murmur of a discussion and then Bruce closes the door again.

“He’s got another bag to get,” Bruce explains, points out the window and they watch as James starts making his way back to his own ship. “Says all the suits are in these two, he just needs to get the helmets.” Adam crouches down by one of the bags that had been tossed to them, flicks open the tabs keeping it closed and pulls out a folded suit, the color matching the one that James was currently dressed in. He rises, unfolds it, holds it up to look it over. It’s definitely newer than the one they had sent Peake out in earlier: it’s still fairly clunky, but the material isn’t as rough and the machines sewn into it are smaller. Adam throws the one he’s holding to Bruce, takes out a second which he hands to Lawrence, who accepts it with some reluctance as a horrible thought starts to worm it’s way into his head. He’d been so ready to leave, so focused still on the fact that someone had _shot at them_ only moments before, that he hadn’t even considered—

 _The second this suit starts working, it’s going to be that gaming headset all over again_.

Everything has a computer in it these days and they have for longer than Lawrence had been alive. It hadn’t meant much to him, hadn’t been something to worry about. It was human progress and he was just happy to be able to play with the latest toys but now… He was never more painfully aware of how many wires, how many pieces of software were controlling, regulating, watching even the most benign of everyday objects. This suit made sure he was breathing, kept an eye on his vital signs, made it so he could talk to anybody in the area that might be listening. It was a modern marvel, truly, but a modern marvel that would send him, at best, into forced sensory deprivation.

 _At worst_ , he thinks, _it’ll kill me_.

“Bruce,” he hears Adam say and he sounds slightly exasperated, “Could you help him get that thing on?” They had translated his stillness as confusion and he holds out a hand when Bruce starts to approach him.

“I can do it,” Lawrence says and Bruce puts up his own hands in acquiescence and backs away. One leg at a time, up over his stomach, his chest, puts his arms through the sleeves and pulls his head through the tight rubber hole that clings to his neck, a round metal ring curving around it, waiting for a helmet which, Lawrence figures by the knock on the door, had just arrived.

This time, when the door opens, only one bag comes through it, carefully this time, pushed along the floor by a gentle kick and a body follows close behind. He waits for the door to close completely before removing his helmet and the face underneath grins at them.

“Well,” James says, “Nice to put some faces to those names. I’m gonna guess that you’re Adam,” he says, points to the correct person. “You look like a Bruce. And you’re Lawrence?” They both nod. “Great.” He taps at the third bag he had brought with his toes. “There ya go.”

Adam starts to unload the three helmets, tugging them free, but he stops once they're all lined up on the floor.

“What about that thing?” He asks and it’s clear he’s asking Bruce and Lawrence but James is the one to respond to the question.

“What thing?”

“When Peake was outside, he said he saw something attached to our ship. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there. He was going to check it out before— If it has anything to do with why those people were shooting or how they managed to sneak up on us, I don’t want it there anymore. If that guy has friends…”

“Hey,” James says, “If we had a leash for one of you, I’d say go for it but all we’ve got is that metal bar. You go drifting off somewhere, I can’t guarantee we’d be able to get you back. Do you even know where it is?”

“ _I_ don’t,” Adam says, clunks over to the display and, surprisingly, the screen reacts to the touch of his gloved hand. “Hey, uh, Peake? You there?”

“Yeah,” Peake says. “What’s up?”

“That black box… thing that you saw on the _Reaper_. Where is it exactly?” There’s a slight pause on the other end, as if Peake is thinking about or, possibly, as if he doesn’t want to tell him, although Lawrence isn’t sure why. 

“It’s near the bottom. Sort of… about five feet away and six feet down from the shaft connecting the two ships.” Another pause. “I know what you’re thinking. I support you if you want to go for it but I don’t know if it’s the best idea.”

“I know,” Adam says. “But I have to at least _try_ , alright? Maybe we can—”

“We can chain,” Bruce says, interrupts him. “Someone holds onto the rod, links arms with someone else. I think the four of us should be able to reach it, right?” He looks back and forth between the others and nobody argues.

“I’m up for it,” James says eventually. “What’s a little more adventure between new friends, huh?”

“Okay,” Adam says, picks up one of the helmets. “It’s my ship so I’ll be at the end. I’ll try to pry it off.”

“I’ll hang on to the rod,” James says.

“Guess that means you and me are stuck in the middle,” Bruce says to Lawrence, who manages a weak smile in return. _I’m not going to be any help to anyone if I’m nothing but a floating sack of flour_ , he thinks. _There has to be a way around it. There has to be something I can do. I have until someone puts on my helmet to figure it out_.

He goes over it as quickly as he can, mutters to himself as he works it out and the other three are too busy helping each other put the last pieces of their suits on that they don’t notice.

_The computers are fighting with the ones in my head. It’s overloading. It’s too much so my brain figures it needs to turn off a few things to compensate and, unfortunately for me, that’s nearly every one of my senses. It shuts down my senses to give everything else a chance to work because otherwise there’s too much power and—_

_There’s too much power. But I can turn the power down. I can put myself to sleep._

Not completely, though. He doesn’t have to make it as it is when he’s trying to get some rest but he can shift it down to like it was when he was sitting on the bed that was now most likely another piece of debris, drifting amongst the stars.

 _I’d still be fucked_ , Lawrence thinks. He’d be mostly blind and almost entirely deaf. He wouldn’t be able to communicate. His grip wouldn’t be nearly as strong as it could be and getting his legs to take him from here to outside would be nearly impossible. _But at least I won’t be dead. So that’s something, I guess_.

Someone—Adam—is starting to lower the helmet over him and, for a brief moment, it feels as if time has slowed.

 _You have to tell them_ , a voice in the back of his head says. _You have to tell them. Tell them_ something _. Tell them, tell them, tell them, tell_ — 

“Wait!” He yells just seconds before the helmet is closed completely down over his head and Adam freezes.

“I know you’ve probably never worn one of these before,” Adam starts to assure him, “But I promise—”

“It’s— It’s not that,” Lawrence says and then hesitates, swallows. He feels warm and he can hear his mechanical heart working in his ears. “I have to tell you guys something.”

“Right now?” Adam asks, lifts the helmet off of Lawrence’s head, holds it in front of himself like an empty fishbowl.

“I—” He pauses again. How does he explain this without standing here for an hour? “I have machines,” he says finally. “Inside of me.”

“You… what?” Lawrence can tell by the confused and slightly stunned way that Adam says that that it was extraordinarily low on the possibly lengthy list of things he was expecting Lawrence to confess to them.

“It’s sort of a long story,” Lawrence says, “And I—” Deep breath. “I’ll explain it later. I owe you that much after what just happened.”

“What does that mean exactly? ‘You owe us’? Do you— Do you know why they were attacking us?” Bruce asks. He sounds agitated already and he doesn’t even know the whole truth of things yet. Lawrence takes in another slow inhale, exhale, looks away from him and back to Adam, who’s simply staring back with a nearly unreadable expression.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have—” _Maybe I should have kept that part to myself for a little while longer_. “Look, I have to do something really stupid if I want to put this suit on and get to their ship. I, uh, I’m gonna have to shut part of my brain off. Just a bit.” They’re gazing at him, dumbfounded, and he coughs nervously.

“I’m sorry,” James says eventually, “You’re going to have to do _what_?”

“Remember when you were talking to me on that first day?” Lawrence addresses Adam and Adam acknowledges that he’s still listening. “When you said it looked like I was staring right at you but I didn’t hear a word you said. I told you I was zoning out but—”

“You had part of your _brain_ turned off?” Bruce asks.

“Yeah. It’s how I sleep now. And it helps with the headaches sometimes,” he says, watches Adam and Bruce share a look and they glance at James, who puts his hands up, takes a step back. _I know I said something already but I’m staying out of this now, guys_ , he seems to say. “When I put on that headset before—”

“When you were freaking out,” Bruce says and Lawrence nods once.

“Right. It killed my senses. I couldn’t see or hear or feel anything. My entire body— It was bad, is what I’m saying. If I put the rest of this suit on, if I turn it on just the way I am right now… That could happen again. Or it could be worse. Or, hell, maybe it won’t do anything. I don’t know but I’m pretty sure doing this is the only way I’ll get there.” He clears his throat. “We can still try to get that box that’s stuck to your ship.”

“How? If you’re going to be—”

“I won’t be completely— I’m only turning it down to about fifty percent. Half power. I’ll still know what’s going on, I’ll just, you know, be partially blind and deaf. And mute. But otherwise I’ll be fine,” Lawrence says, shrugs, hopes he makes it sound somewhat believable. “I’ll be like an action figure. You just put me where you want me and I’ll stay there.”

“I don’t know about this…” Bruce says but Lawrence just stares at Adam, who stares right back at him, eyes narrowed, mouth pulled into a frown. They stay like that in that little tableau for what feels like hours until, finally, Adam says:

“What do you need us to do?”

 

— — —

 

He turns himself down before Adam puts on the helmet and, from that point on, the extent of what he knows is happening and his ability to process it are practically non-existent. He knows they’re talking but he can’t make out any words, sees their shadows as they move around him. There’s a hand on his elbow, another pair pushing at his back and he’s being directed forward, his feet are moving somehow. He gets one almost chilling glimpse of the nebulous expanse outside and then his sight flickers, goes completely black and suddenly he feels completely weightless.

 _I should be able to see_ , he thinks, and even his own thoughts sound like mush in his head. _Something isn’t right. This was supposed to work_. Space is dark, he knows that, but there’s always even a little bit of light coming from somewhere out there and the ships themselves are bright, warm beacons surrounded by nothing. He should be aware of that at least. He should know where they are but he’s completely blind. Is it so quiet inside his helmet because they aren’t talking to him or his hearing gone, too? He wants to tell someone to say something but he can’t and things could get worse if he turns his brain up even ten percent more just to do it.

He can still feel, he still knows he’s got his hands holding on to something but what if that disappears right alongside everything else? 

 _I’m going to get someone killed_ , he thinks. _This was a stupid, stupid idea. Stupid, stupid, Lawrence, thinking he has all the solutions. At least I don’t think they’ve started the chain yet._ He doesn’t think they have but it’s impossible to tell how much time has really passed. _If they haven’t, though, I could—_ He could what?

 _I could let go_.

The thought makes his blood run cold. Where did that even come from? It almost didn’t even sound like his own voice somehow. The whole point of this trip was to get to people who could fix him, who could make him better, who could make it so he could live even a slightly more normal life—as normal as anyone could be packed with computers and metal. He doesn’t want to die but the idea was still there, still whispering at him.

_I wouldn’t have to lie to them. I wouldn’t have to tell them the whole truth, either. ExoBio would stop looking for me, would stop going after them._

_Maybe all the little machines inside me would keep me alive. Maybe I’d just float out here forever._

_Maybe that would be_ —

Every single one of his senses comes crashing back at once. There’s light and a thousand different noises, some human, some not and he takes in a few deep breaths, his body floundering as it wakes back up. He’s laying down on a hard surface, a low metal ceiling just above him and he realizes that the shadowy darkness that’s falling over him isn’t his vision still failing, but a body leaning over him. Someone is saying his name, there are hands on his shoulders, gently shaking him.

“—awrence.” It’s Adam and Lawrence blinks up at him, confused. How did he end up here? He hadn’t turned his brain back up to one hundred-percent, unless he had done it without thinking about it.

“What—?” There seems to be a collective letting go of held in, anxious breath and Adam sits back, hits the floor hard, rests an arm on one of his legs, puts his other hand to his head. Lawrence sits up, props himself on his elbows and looks around the room. Everyone is there: Bruce standing just behind Adam, Peake hovering just a few feet away, James and a blonde woman Lawrence figures is Elyse hanging back near one of the walls. They’re obviously on the _Benson_ now and the room they’re crowded in is surprisingly large, despite that fact that their ship really isn’t much bigger than Adam’s.

“We hooked you to the pole,” Bruce says, and his voice is hoarse as if he had been shouting only moments before. “Figured that was the best spot. Everything was fine like you said and then you—”

“—You said ‘goodbye’,” Adam says quietly. Lawrence slowly shakes his head. That wasn’t possible. He had turned his brain down. He shouldn’t have been able to say anything, at least nothing so clearly that they could understand him. And did that mean he really _had_ let go, had allowed himself to start floating away? That wasn’t him. It was as if someone else had made that decision for him and he was helpless to fight against it.

“James grabbed you before you got too far away,” Bruce says, “And we managed to all get back to the bar connecting the ships. We had to drag you in here.” Lawrence sits up a little more, tries to parse if he sounds angry or sad or something else entirely but he can’t figure it out. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Lawrence says. “I was fine. It was working but then—” _Maybe I could let go_. “Did you get the thing off the ship at least?”

“Yeah,” Adam says, like he can’t believe Lawrence is really asking him that _now_ , and he picks up a black box about the size of his two palms pressed side-by-side. The red light that Peake had seen isn’t on and Lawrence knows almost immediately what it is—or, at least, what it used to be, for the most part—but he doesn’t say anything about it, takes it from him instead, rubs his thumb over the smooth surface. “What is it?” Adam asks and, for a moment, Lawrence thinks he’s asking about what the box was but then he looks at Adam and sees that he’s not looking at the object, he’s looking at _him_. “The package,” he says, just in case Lawrence wasn’t getting it. He stands up and Lawrence does, too, just so he’s not the only one still on the floor. There are ten pairs of eyes focused solely on him and it’s making him itchy. “I swear, I will pay you back that thousand but I am done not asking you questions. What the hell is it that people are— are _shooting_ at us and attaching whatever the hell that is to my ship? Why are you— Why are you like _this_. What the _fuck_ have you gotten me— gotten my _friends_ into.”

( _His friends._ Lawrence isn’t going to pretend that that doesn’t sting, that it had gone so quickly from ‘us’ to ‘you and my friends’. He wonders if Adam had done that on purpose or if it just slipped out by accident.)

Lawrence doesn’t want to talk about this—not ever and especially not now. He needs to be alone, needs an hour to recover from the fact that he had just tried to end it all and he didn’t even know he was doing it, to deal with the fact that when his brain gets a little overwhelmed or fried, it’s first and only thought is _death_. But everyone is staring and waiting and, as he had said just before they left: He owes them.

“It’s me,” Lawrence says. “I’m the package.”

“What?” Lawrence knows how ridiculous it sounds as soon as it comes out of his mouth and he exhales slowly, figures the best place to start, as with most explanations, is at the beginning.

“About three months ago, I answered an ad…”

 

— — —

 

Lawrence tells them everything: about the surgery, about the cameras, about the side effects and the phone call, about the car at the hangar. He talks non-stop for almost an hour, maybe more and, when he finishes, his final words are met with a very tense silence.

“I—” He starts to say, to keep speaking even though his throat is parched, because the quiet is making him apprehensive but Adam cuts him off to yell: 

“ExoBio?! You stole from _ExoBio_?!”

“I don’t know if I’d really define it as ‘stealing’,” Lawrence says. “I mean, it’s still my—”

“No,” Adam says, interrupts him again. “No. That _shit_ inside you has their name stamped on it. It belongs to them. _You_ belong to them. Jesus Christ, Lawrence, do you have any idea what companies are willing to do these days to keep their intellectual property? People go _missing_ and that’s just what happens with small tech companies! This is Exo- _fucking_ -Bio!”

“I know.”

“They sabotaged my ship! They _shot at us_ ,” Adam’s still shouting and he takes a step towards Lawrence as if he’s planning on doing something but that’s all he does, just moves a little closer. “You were lucky we were all in the cockpit. And Peake—” He points behind himself, in the general direction of where Peake was still standing. “If these guys hadn’t been there…”

“ _I know_ ,” Lawrence repeats and Adam turns away from him, sighs into one of his hands and then turns back. When he starts speaking again, he’s disconcertingly calm.

“When you insisted it wasn’t drugs and then paid me to stop asking questions… I thought, you know, maybe it was drugs anyway. You don’t look like a dealer but you can never tell these things anymore. I figured ‘ten thousand dollars, a trip to Fyto… I could handle that’. I wouldn’t be happy about it but it’d be a one time thing. At least I could fly again without being under the thumb of Shooting Star.” He pauses, takes in a breath. “I really fucking wish it was drugs.” He starts to walk away, makes it to the door that Lawrence guesses leads to the rest of the ship and then hesitates. “Here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to get you to Fyto. Somehow, I’ll get you the rest of the way there. But you’ll have to find another way home. And Lawrence?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t talk to me." 

“For how long?” Lawrence asks. Adam doesn’t answer, opens the door, and walks away. They all leave after that, one by one, none of them saying a thing and, eventually, Lawrence finds himself standing completely alone, the only sound the hum of the engine and a faint whine of the wires in his head.

 

— — —

 

The _Benson_ has the same basic layout that the _Reaper_ does except it has a lot more stuff, the lights just a bit brighter and instead of the dark metal Lawrence had already gotten used to, the walls and some of the floors were painted a sort of grey that should have made everything look dismal but was surprisingly relaxing, and his footsteps were softer as he walked. The others weren’t blatantly avoiding him but they were also making it clear enough that they weren’t looking for his company either and he winds up in a room on the second floor with a couple of chairs and a long desk, the drawers packed with various tools suited for taking apart and fixing small computer-like devices instead of engines and ship hulls.

He still has the box that Adam had handed to him and he’s still dressed in his suit, too, so, after dropping the box on the table, he peels the spacesuit off, kicks it away towards a corner of the room and sits down, flicking on a single light that blinked a few times before shining a bright white over the workspace.

Lawrence rests his elbows on the desk, turns the device over and over in his hands. Normally, something like this would be used back home by people looking to hide their tech from any possible prying eyes. It certainly wasn’t portable but, put it down beside your laptop while you worked and nobody would be able to track you unless they were literally sitting in the same room. It was supposed to only be able to mask smaller electronic devices but someone had modified this one to mask an entire ship instead, to keep it from appearing on radar until it wanted to be seen—until it was too late. How long had they been tracking Adam’s ship? It could have been with them since they passed the border and they never would have known. They _didn’t_ know.

He puts it down, rests his chin down on his hands and stares at it carefully. The light was off but it didn’t mean it wasn’t still working and the only way to be certain would be to smash it. Then again…

“I wonder…” Lawrence says to himself and sits up, rummages through the drawer of tools before yanking the entire thing out and dumping it onto the desk. “Let’s see what’s going on in there, shall we?”

 

— — —

 

Lawrence isn’t sure how long he’s been sitting there, loses track of time and, for once, it’s not because he’s blacked out. The box is in pieces in front of him now—some of them no bigger than his thumbnail—and he prods at one of them with a thin screwdriver, nudges aside a pair of tweezers, pushes around a CPU. Working on this, taking it apart, had helped him forget for awhile about everything that had happened in only a matter of what he’s realizing is a couple of hours but, now that he has nothing else to do, he also has nothing else but that to think about.

There’s a knock on the door and he considers not answering, pretending that nobody was home and hope that they go away. He could spend the rest of the trip locked in here, alone. He could shut himself down for the three or so days it would take to get the rest of the way to Fyto. He’d read somewhere that the human body could survive almost an entire month without food. Water was a completely different story, though, but if he was asleep, would it really matter? He laughs to himself, just a little. Before this whole thing began, he’d had the same thought: sleep through it, make it easier but he’d disregarded it because it wasn’t practical, wasn’t safe, and now here he was giving it more than just a passing consideration. _Just take the easy way out, Lawrence. Because that’s solved all your problems in the past, hasn’t it?_

The door opens even though he hadn’t offered an invitation and he’s surprised to see Bruce walk in. Lawrence isn’t sure who he expected it to be—definitely not Adam—but it wasn’t him. He hadn’t expected _anyone_.

“A ship this size,” Bruce says, “And yet it takes me twenty minutes to find someone.”

“Who’re you looking for?” Lawrence asks and Bruce stares at him, bewildered. 

“You.”

“Oh. Well. Here I am,” Lawrence says, lifts his arms.

“What is all this?” Bruce asks, gestures to the mess of metal pieces stretched out on the desk in front of Lawrence.

“It _was_ the box that was attached to Adam’s ship. I thought maybe I could take it apart, do something clever but, well… turns out it’s infinitely easier to destroy something than it is to put it back together. Good news is that I’m definitely sure it’s not working anymore.”

“So you know what it was? What it was doing.”

“I mean, yeah,” Lawrence says. “But it doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s broken. It won’t be a problem from now on.” He starts scooping the parts up, pushing them into a pile, figures that was it but Bruce is still there. “I won’t be a problem anymore, either. I’ll just stay in here, out of the way.”

“Come on, Lawrence, you don’t have to—" 

“It’s fine,” Lawrence says.

“Okay,” Bruce says. “Alright. I just figured you’d want to know James and Elyse are gonna get us to Fyto. They’ll tow Adam’s ship there. We figure there’s gotta be _someone_ down there who’ll be able to fix it and if not, they’ve even suggested towing it all the way back home for us.”

“That’s good,” Lawrence says, isn’t sure why he’s telling him the last part since he won’t be going with them. Bruce finally starts to leave but then stops, turns back around, stares at Lawrence for a couple of seconds that seemed to drag on for much longer than that.

“Why’d you do it?”

“Do what?”

“All that stuff with ExoBio. Letting them put all that junk into you.” He walks back over to the desk, leans forward and rest his arms down on the surface and Lawrence sits back, sighs slowly, lifts his shoulders.

“Doesn’t everyone kind of want to be a robot?”

“Ehh… Not really,” Bruce says.

“Ah. I don’t know. It’s the next step in human progress, isn’t it? Making yourself better through machines. I guess I wanted to be part of that. Not just read about it years later when they perfected it, when they made the study public, but to _live it_. I wasn’t just stumbling towards the future. I _am_ the future.”

“And how’s that going for you?” Bruce asks.

“Not so great, thanks,” Lawrence says. “They said I’d experience ‘minor discomfort’ but none of this feels minor. What happened out there...” He looks down at his hands. _You said ‘goodbye’_. “I think I’m getting worse.” It’s the first time that he’s verbalized what he’s been holding onto in the back of his head for the past few days or maybe even since they let him go home almost three weeks ago. When it started, his head would only hurt sometimes but now it never seemed to end, there was never a moment when there _wasn’t_ pain. He hadn’t lost time, hadn’t woken up covered in drool in awhile but his body felt slower, something inside wasn’t _right_ and the sudden lack of a side effect made him worry that it was building up to one last hurrah. _I’m like a ticking time bomb_ , he thinks. _Any minute I could fall over and that would be it._

He thought about shutting himself down but could he even risk it anymore?

“Do you really believe there’s someone on Fyto that can actually help you?” Bruce asks, snaps Lawrence out of his contemplation.

“I _talked_ to someone, Bruce. They said—” He knows what they said, he’s told them all of this already. “I don’t know why they’re on Fyto. There’s a lot I don’t know, actually, but I know that they’re there. I know they said they could fix me, fix what ExoBio did. That’s enough.” They lapse into a brief silence and Lawrence taps the screwdriver against the top of the desk. “Why’re you talking to me?”

“What do you mean?”

“After what I told you… You don’t even seem angry.”

“I am,” Bruce admits. “It was a pretty shitty thing to do, to hide all of that from us.”

“You really think any of you would have helped me if I had been completely honest from the get go?” Lawrence asks.

“I’m not sure,” Bruce says. “But you’ll never know now, will you?” He scratches at his beard and then shrugs, tells him he’s going to go, that they’re all milling around, not doing much if he doesn’t want to hide in here anymore. “They’ve got a window on the second floor, too,” Bruce says. “Nice view. Not as good as ours, though.” And, with that, he walks out, leaving the door wide open behind him.

 

— — —

 

“Hey, there he is,” James says when Lawrence finds his way to the dining area a little while later. He’s sitting at the long table opposite Elyse, bulbs of coffee by their elbows, a tablet between them, and they had both been leaning over it, their heads practically touching but they parted when Lawrence had walked in. Lawrence starts to look around, picks up a coffee for himself from a pack shoved into a cabinet that wasn’t quite big enough to hold it and snaps it open. He thinks about just leaving again but decides against it, sits down at the table but puts himself further away from them, closer to the door. “So… ExoBio, huh?” James asks and Elyse smacks his arm.

“You don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want,” Elyse says but then, after a brief lull, she’s the one who asks: “You really have machines inside you?”

“Yeah,” Lawrence says. “All up in me.”

“I read about that,” James says. “Well, not that specifically but there were rumors that there was a company out there experimenting with that kind of thing. Should have guessed it was ExoBio though. They seem like the type.”

“And you can really just… turn your brain off?” Elyse asks. “Sorry. I shouldn’t— I’ve just never talked to a robot before.”

“I’m not a robot.”

“You’re kind of a robot,” Elyse says. “You’ve got more metal parts than I do.”

“So everyone with more metal parts than you is a robot now?” James teases her. “Amputee: robot. Guy with a heart transplant: robot. Woman with a hearing aid: robot.” She makes a face at him, shakes her head and goes back to whatever they had been doing on their tablet but James turns to look at Lawrence. “Honestly, I’m impressed you guys even made it off the _planet_ considering what you were running off with.”

“Yeah,” Lawrence says, takes a drink of his bitter coffee. He was less impressed and more skeptical. He’d been so relieved that, up until this point, they hadn’t run into any serious trouble, had let himself believe that maybe they didn’t care— _like I said before: acceptable loss_ —but now he wasn’t sure. He’d thought they were safe once before only to be attacked a few days later. They’d be able to see anyone else coming now with that black box in pieces but, for them, that ship could have been Plan A. They weren’t that far from Fyto now, but a lot could happen in three days and even though ExoBio couldn’t hide their ships anymore, it didn’t mean they couldn’t do some serious damage. All they had was _Benson_ and Lawrence knew it could fight back, but could it do that if they were surrounded? If they were encroached on by something much bigger?

“Do you know what’s going on in there?” Elyse asks suddenly, shifts the conversation back to the one she had apparently only temporarily abandoned, gestures to his body.

“Not specifically, no,” Lawrence says. “I asked but they wouldn’t— They said I didn’t want to know.”

“That’s kinda weird,” James says. “You ever think that maybe they didn’t do anything? That they just said they did? Cut you up a bit and sent you home.”

“I did,” Lawrence admits, “Very briefly. But I can feel it in there. It’s kinda— I can’t really explain it. And even if they didn’t, I know they did something up here,” he says, points to his head. They drift back into another moment of silence and Lawrence is almost finished with his coffee, squeezing the last sludgy dredges from the bottom when Elyse starts to ask:

“Hey, can you—”

“Can we not?” Lawrence cuts her off. “Can we— Can we not talk about this anymore?”

“Yeah. Sorry,” Elyse says. “I’ll shut up.” 

“No. I don’t mean—” Lawrence sighs, puts a hand up, palm directed towards the ceiling. “We can talk about something else. How’d you guys wind up here? I know you said you were on a trip but it’s not like there’re amusement parks out here.”

“We work for Zycian,” Elyse says, shifts her eyes to glance at James but he doesn’t look distressed over the fact that she so quickly and easily told Lawrence the truth.

“The pharmaceutical company?” Lawrence asks. “So then why’d you ask if we worked for the government? Aren’t you legally allowed to be out here?”

“Well…” Elyse starts and James finishes:

“Not exactly.”

“It’s a grey area,” Elyse says. “I probably should have said we ‘work’ for them.” She puts the word ‘work’ in quotations with her fingers when she says it. “One of Zycian’s competitors has a guy doing research on Fyto. Our bosses got wind that he might have found something pretty major down there. We’ve been sent to snoop.”

“So you’re... spies,” Lawrence says.

“That makes what we do sound a lot cooler than it actually is so thank you for that,” James says. “To be honest, this whole business with you and your friends is the most exciting thing that’ll probably happen for us this entire trip." 

“They’re not my friends,” Lawrence hears himself say. “We might have been getting there but I definitely think that boat has sailed. To be honest, I don’t even think Adam ever really liked me.” Bruce had gone looking for him, to talk to him but that didn’t mean when this was all over they’d go out for beers every Wednesday. Peake had disappeared but that’s what Peake did and Adam… like he’d just said: he’s not sure there was ever anything close to a blossoming friendship between them. He supposes that realization should make the fact that Adam didn’t want to talk to him anymore a lot easier to handle but, somehow, it doesn’t.

“I don’t know,” James says. “Sure he’s pissed off now, which, I mean, I don’t know the whole situation… Well, I heard a lot of but still... I can make some educated guesses and I don’t blame him. But when we were out there and you said what you said and started floating away? Dude was freaking out more than me and Bruce combined. I thought he was going to go after you himself if I hadn’t managed to snatch you. Probably would have lost you both.”

“Really?” Lawrence asks and James makes a face at him that seems to say: _I’m telling the truth. Whether you believe me or not is up to you_. He had no real reason to lie to Lawrence, to just say something to try and make him feel better.

“Heard the whole thing,” Elyse says, taps her finger an inch away from her ear. “I think you should go talk to him.”

“But he told me not to.” 

“And...?” Elyse says. “So what? What’s the worst that could happen? He does exactly what you expect.” She gives him an exaggerated shrug. “Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he tells you to go fuck yourself but, hey, at least he talked to you.”

“She’s got a point,” James says and then flicks his hands towards the doorway when Lawrence doesn’t immediately get up. “Go on, get. Scram.”

“Fine,” Lawrence says, standing and throwing away his now empty cup, “But if I walk out of there with a black eye, it’ll be your fault.”

“You know in some cultures,” James calls after Lawrence as he leaves, “Punching people in the face is a great way to start a conversation!”

 

— — —

 

He’s turning a corner on the same floor, just moments after walking out of the dining area, when his vision starts to fade. It doesn’t go completely black like it had when he was floating outside, but how it was _supposed_ to feel when he turned his brain down a few percentages, that same eyes-wrapped-in-gauze sort of feel where he can still see shapes and some light, still aware of shadows but not much else. He stumbles, stutters and stops walking, blinks as if he had just gotten dirt in his eyes and could clean it out and, for two seconds it does come back before it goes away again.

“Okay,” he says to himself, “Alright. Just— Just need to find somewhere to sit for a minute.” He thinks about turning back but changes his mind, goes forward, takes his time, moves past closed doors and decides not to fumble with the panels to try and open them, finally stops at an open doorway and, even with failing vision, he can tell where he is: it’s the same sort of room that was on the _Reaper_ , a giant window taking over most of a wall, looking out into space except, this time, instead of seeing nothing but the black void, all he can make out is the looming shape of Adam’s ship, still securely attached to the _Benson_ the two of them holding hands as they fly to their destination.

He walks in and drops down on the floor, sits facing the window. The last time he was in somewhere like this it had staggered him, made him dizzy enough that he had to leave the room but now it felt like nothing. _I was out there_ , he thinks, _and I didn’t even get a chance to really appreciate it. I didn’t get to panic about it either._ He crawls closer to the window, puts his face right up to the cold glass but, with his lack of vision, it looks even more like he’s staring into a pitch black hole he could fall into at any moment and he backs away again, sighs into one of his hands.

“At least you’re handling that better than the first time,” Adam says and Lawrence jumps, turns his head to where the noise was coming from and can just barely make out a figure leaning against the wall to his right. How long had he been there? His hearing was still obviously intact. He must have already been in the room when Lawrence wandered in. Of course he hadn’t seen him; he couldn’t see much of _anything_ right then. Adam starts to move and, at first, Lawrence thinks he’s going to walk out of the room but he closes the gap between them instead and joins him on the floor. “I’d ask if you were looking for me but you didn’t seem to notice I was in here when you walked in.”

“I was,” Lawrence says, “Looking for you, I mean. Kind of.” He hesitates, picks at the skin around one of his thumbs. “You’re talking to me.”

“Yeah, well…” He might have shrugged, but he also might have just been shifting. Lawrence frowns, tries to force his brain to bring his vision back and, just like in the hallway, it does for a second before flickering back to near-darkness. “I still can’t believe you dragged me into this. That you got me involved with— Even if we all make it back in one piece, do you have any idea how much trouble we could be in?”

“I know! I know, alright? I get it. You can tell them I took you hostage or something. I threatened your loved ones. You didn’t have a choice or—”

“We _didn’t_ have a choice, Lawrence! None of us had a single minute to prepare! If we’d known right away then maybe we’d have checked the ship after we left. You wanted Bruce as protection but he can’t _do that_ if he doesn’t know what he’s protecting you from! We treated this like it was nothing because _we thought it was nothing_. Do you— I mean, you do get that? At all?”

“I do,” Lawrence says. “I just thought… I thought not telling you would be safer.”

“In what universe could withholding that information have _possibly_ made sense? It’s like seeing a car sitting on train tracks and watching a train coming but deciding not to warn the driver!”

“I feel like the driver is going to notice a train coming,” Lawrence says, immediately regrets saying it as soon as the words have left his mouth. Adam scoffs at him. “I don’t have a good explanation for you. It seemed like the right idea at the time.” There’s more heavy silence between them.

“Bruce said you told him that it’s getting worse,” Adam says eventually.

“I may have mentioned that,” Lawrence says and then changes the subject, points out the window toward where Adam’s ship is. “How bad is it?”

“What do you mean ‘how bad is it’? There’s a giant hole in the side. You’re staring right at it.”

“Am I?” Lawrence asks. He was staring out at the shape of the ship but he had no idea what specific part of it he had settled his gaze. He narrows his eyes, squints like it should help make things clearer and he doesn’t realize the implications of those two words to Adam until he notices that he hasn’t said anything right away in response. Lawrence hadn’t wanted Adam to know, purposely steered the subject away from it but managed to drive right into the wall anyway. He can tell Adam is moving, puts himself in Lawrence’s line-of-sight, waves his hand in front of his face and Lawrence swats it away. “I’m not completely— I know where you are,” he says, reaches forward and pokes Adam on the shoulder.

“How long—?”

“Just a few minutes ago. It comes back if I focus really hard on it.”

“Lawrence…”

“You know, when a computer starts acting up, you just restart it. I’m basically a computer, right? Maybe if I just turn everything off for about thirty seconds or so that might…” There’s no point in waiting, he figures, there’s no right moment, doesn’t need to make sure he’s comfortable or in a nice chair. He thinks he hears Adam say _Lawrence, wait_ but he’s already started the process and, a few seconds later, everything disappears.

 

— — —

 

“ _Fuck you_ , Lawrence,” Adam says as soon as Lawrence wakes up again. He’s surprised to find that it worked, that he could see again, and there’s a smaller part of him that’s shocked he even woke up at all _and_ that Adam had stayed. “Do you have _any idea_ what that looks like to someone else when you do that?”

“No,” Lawrence says. _You looked like you’d fucking died_ , he suddenly remembers Bruce had said to him when Lawrence had nodded off in the car while they sat at a gas station. 

“You can’t just—” He puts his hands over his face and makes an aggravated noise into them. “Did it work at least?” He asks when he takes his hands away.

“Yeah. I don’t know how long it’ll last but yeah, it worked.”

“Jesus Christ,” Adam mutters to himself. “There has to be alcohol somewhere on this ship. I need a shot of something.” He stands, starts for the open doorway and then pauses when he realizes Lawrence isn’t following. “You coming or what?”

 

— — —

 

James and Elyse are still in the dining room, occupied by their tablet—which mysteriously seems to have reproduced, a much smaller one sitting beside it—when Lawrence wanders back in accompanied by Adam and they both watch them enter, Elyse giving Lawrence a thumbs up.

“What was that for?” Adam asks quietly and Lawrence shakes his head, pretends as if he had no idea. “Hey,” Adam says, slightly louder, to the pair, “You have anything to drink around here?”

“I assume you’re not looking for a glass of water,” James says and then pulls himself up from his seat and walks over to a tall cabinet on the opposite side of the room, yanks the doors open to reveal a few bottles of the same cheap vodka that Lawrence had been drinking back on Adam’s ship. “There ya’ go.” He picks one at random and hands it to Adam, reaches down next to open a drawer with a couple of rows of shot glasses. “Let’s see… one for you, one for Robo-Man,” he says, takes out two glasses and Adam glances at Lawrence when James says it, and Lawrence just shrugs. “One for me. One for Elyse.” He balances each glass on a finger and leads them back to the table. Elyse turns off what they were doing, stacks the tablets and pushes them off to the side. “Alright. To...” James says, lifting his glass once its full and the others follow his movements but he falters.

“To making it this far,” Elyse says. Nobody can think of anything better so they clink their shots together in a mess of hands and drink them down.

Bruce starts to walk past the room a minute later but then backtracks, stands in the doorway.

“Aw, man, nobody invited me to this little party,” he says, and then turns his head down the right side of the hall and shouts: “Hey, Peake! They’re doing shots!” Lawrence isn’t sure if Peake is actually there or if Bruce is just hoping that the guy is in the vicinity and might be able to hear him but then, sure enough, Peake wanders into view, stands on his toes to peer over Bruce’s shoulder.

“We’re not ‘doing shots’,” Adam says as the come inside and join them. “We had _one_ drink.”

“Well, I haven’t had one,” Bruce says. “Glasses?” James gestures to the still-open drawer and Bruce smacks the table once before jogging over, grabbing two more glasses and slamming them down. “Come on guys,” he says after he finishes filling his and Peake’s glass, “Don’t make us drink these by ourselves. One more. Just have one more.” He holds up his index finger at them, waiting for someone to relent.

“I’ll have another,” Lawrence says.

“Of course _you_ will,” Adam says, but let’s Lawrence top up his glass anyway. Lawrence must have given him a look because Adam laughs at him. “You really didn’t think I noticed all my alcohol disappearing once you showed up? And I know it wasn’t either of those two,” he says, points at Bruce and Peake.

“What’re we drinking to?” Bruce asks.

“I think we decided on ‘not being dead’,” James says. “Or something along those lines.”

“Good enough,” Bruce says. It has to be good enough, Lawrence figures. It’s really the only thing they have worth celebrating.

 

— — —

 

It happens a few more times over the next three days. For the most part, it’s just his vision that goes but once it’s his hearing and, another time he finds he can’t speak for a couple of hours. Each time, Lawrence manages to fix the problem by shutting himself down for a short while and then coming back but there’s only so many times he can use that before it only works for a few minutes at a time or, even worse, stops working at all. 

He doesn’t tell anyone about it, doesn’t mention it to Adam outside of the incident that he had witnessed in the room with the window and yet, somehow, they all seem to know or, at least, are aware when something is going wrong. They don’t outright ask him if he’s alright, if he needed help, but somebody had found lights to attach to the ladders leading to different floors and there’s music streaming near constantly through the ship’s speakers as if they wanted to give him something to hear so he’d know when he couldn’t. 

James and Elyse have the same console that Adam had (or might still have, if it hadn’t been blown out into space) and Lawrence sits, listening to everyone as they yell at each other while they play _Speed Champ 3_ and _Food Fighters_.

(“Fuck!” Adam shouts at one point after losing for the fifth time in a row. “Avenge me,” he says and tosses the controller at Lawrence. The screen flips upside down for him half-way through, but he still manages to beat James who had, up until then, been on an easy winning streak.

“Wow, Adam,” James says, “you were finally able to beat the—” He turns around to gloat and realizes that Adam isn’t even holding the controller anymore. “Hey! You can’t just— That win doesn’t count. We’re starting over. Alright, Lawrence you versus me. I’m throwin’ down the gauntlet.”

“I can’t,” Lawrence says and the entire room falls silent. They think— “No, it’s that— The screen’s upside-down.”

“It’s not,” Elyse says. “Character select. Says it right there.” She points at the top of the screen where, for Lawrence, there were two pairs of animated feet dancing, her finger two feet above where the words she was reading were.

“Not for me,” Lawrence says and Bruce surprises both him and everyone else by laughing.

“He— He was playing it the wrong way and he still beat you!” He says to James and James grimaces.

“Is it really upside-down?” Elyse asks and Lawrence shrugs. “That’s wild.”)

There’s a few brief moments during those seventy-two hours that Lawrence almost finds himself hoping that they never actually make it to Fyto. He doesn’t want them to die, to explode in some sudden battle but, rather, it’s the complete opposite: he wants to fly like this for as long as possible. Things may be getting worse for him physically but, in general, he knows that it’s horribly likely that things also won’t get better than how it is right at that very moment.

Even if they do leave him behind, never speak to him again, at least it won’t have ended with cold shoulders and anger. Maybe Adam was still resentful, maybe the others only tolerated Lawrence, but at least they had done him the courtesy of pretending before they reached the end of the line.

 

— — —

 

They were all squeezed together in the cockpit so they were all there to see it when Fyto came into view and they stare at the surface of it, covered with still mostly untouched greens and faint stretches of blue, patches of brown and swirls of dark clouds.

James leans over the display in front of one of the chairs, pulls down a visual of a gauge, swiping his finger along the screen and the ship comes to a halt, lurches slightly as Adam’s ship stops two seconds after and then rests back into formation. Almost immediately after they settle into orbit, a window pops on one of the screens in front of James, signalling that someone is attempting to contact them and he pushes a button, opens the channel.

“Hello there,” James says, “This is the _SC Benson_. We’re requesting permission to land.”

“Good afternoon, _Benson_ ,” a man says in response. “May I ask what your business is here today?” Lawrence doesn’t fault them on their cautiousness. Visitors here must be few and far between and he guesses that the people who do show up are there on a schedule—food, medicine, equipment. 

“James and Elyse Willems,” James says. “We’re here about the Noviam research? I believe we’re expected.” None of what they said, Lawrence realizes, is technically a lie. They just happened to omit who actually sent them. “But we’ve got a few extra passengers with us and ship with a pretty impressive hole in it. Will that be a problem?”

“Hang on,” the man says and disappears from the line. He returns a minute later. “You’re good to go, _Benson_. I’ll send you directions on where to land. Someone will be there to greet you when you arrive.”

“Thanks,” James says and cuts the connection, stares at the screen while he waits for the information to come through.

“These people who called you,” Elyse turns to Lawrence from where she’s standing behind James’ seat, arm stretched across the back of the chair, “Did they say where they would meet you or—?”

“No,” Lawrence admits, “They just told me to get here. But there can’t be that many people, right? I’m sure someone will find me.” From what Lawrence knows, when scientists had discovered what they wound up calling Fyto, they had sent only a handful of people to explore and study it. There had been no point to start building anything but a few research labs. He wasn’t expecting to be rushed the minute he stepped off the ship but he figured someone had to recognize him, to know who to send him to. “Someone will find me,” he repeats, mostly to reassure himself, but he says it to whomever is standing next to him and he sees that it’s Peake, who nods. _I’m sure they will._

“Any last minute mind changes?” James asks, turning in his chair to look at the rest of the group but nobody says anything and so he spins back around to the display in front of him. “Alright, then. I’m going in.”

 

— — —

 

The outside gets more and more lush as they descend, trees with bright leaves and pitch black trunks whipping against the sides of their ships, vines with thick roots and painful thorns the length of one of Lawrence’s fingers creeping up the branches. They fall slowly through a hole cleared in the canopy, land as gently as possible on a large block of raised concrete, Adam’s ship creaking and groaning as it finally touched down without proper landing gear.

An immense forest stretches out, surrounding them for miles and the ground has been beaten down, paths made in the dark soil and brown plants and a few feet from where they had landed were four large and blocky single-story buildings, solar panels built into the roofs, collecting the light from some far off sun. There is, indeed, a woman who waits for them to turn off their engine before climbing a short set of stairs up to the landing pad, a white lab coat pulled over a beige jumpsuit, an American flag patch sewn into the front underneath a name tag displaying her last name—Stieber—swirled with black stitching.

They file out together, one-by-one, stand as a group and she smiles carefully at them, swipes hair out of her face and hugs an arm around her stomach, uses the other to gesture as she talks.

“Welcome to Fyto. James and Elyse…?” She asks, holds out her hand and the two of them step forward, shake her hand. “Ah. Hello. Doctor Zheng is in Lab C, just there,” she points to the building closest to where they were standing and James and Elyse hesitate, turn to glance behind them but Adam shoos them off. They did what they had said they were going to do: they got them there. James waves once and they walk away, talking quietly back and forth. “You must be the extra passengers then,” Stieber says, swivels slightly to look over Adam’s ship and she gives it a low whistle. “What happened?”

“Pirates,” Bruce says.

“We were lucky we ran into those two,” Adam says.

“Call me nosy,” Stieber chuckles, “But what were you four doing all the way out here? We’re the only planet for hundreds of miles and we only have the Willems’ on our schedule.” She’s still attempting to look cheerful and welcoming but Lawrence notices it wavering just a fraction. Lawrence watches Adam open his mouth and then close it again, can practically hear the gears in his head turning as he attempts to come up with a decent fib and what he had said earlier goes rolling through Lawrence’s own mind: _We didn’t have a choice, Lawrence! None of us had a single minute to prepare!_

“They’re here because they brought me,” Lawrence says, takes a step forward and he doesn’t miss her miniscule step back.

“And who are you exactly?”

“Lawrence Sonntag,” he says, waits a moment but no flashes of recognition skitter across her face. “Look, it’s a really long story and I won’t try to get into the whole thing with you but someone called me from here last week. I was part of an ExoBio project and… and it’s really messed me up,” he says. “But I got a call from someone who said they could help me. They could fix what they did. That they knew—” He exhales slowly. “They said they could help.” Stieber narrows her eyes at him and all geniality is officially gone. She glances over her shoulder, as if she’s looking for something and then looks back to Lawrence.

“You got a call? From someone here?”

“Yes.” 

“Are you sure?” She asks, shifts from one foot to the other. She seems more nervous than suspicious, talks to him like she’s trying to stretch out the conversation and she moves her head as if she’s simply stretching her neck, chin bumping her shoulder.

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

“I won’t claim I don’t know what kinds of things ExoBio has been researching,” Stieber says. “It’s kind of a poorly kept secret amongst the scientific community. And because I _do_ know what they’re doing, I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that there’s nobody here who could have called you about this. The most any of us know about computers is how to restart them and use our data programs. We’re just— We’re botanists and entomologists. Grass and bugs.”

“What?” Lawrence’s head is starting to spin. This wasn’t right. He knows there’s always been a part of him that thought that maybe this wouldn’t turn out the way that he had hoped, but the closer they had gotten to the planet, the more he had made himself believe that everything had been true. He turns to the others as if hoping one of them would have an explanation, would be able to tell him what the hell was happening but none of them say anything and so he faces Stieber again, shakes his head. “This isn’t— No. That can’t be true. I— I _spoke_ to them. I know I did. They— They— They said they knew what ExoBio had done to me, that it was their idea and ExoBio had stolen it, that what they did—” He rubs at his eyes, his pounding head. This isn’t right. This isn’t fucking right. He thinks back to the conversation with the voice on the phone, to the bad connection, the assurances, even though they were vague.

_They’re not side effects._

_You don’t have to be in pain._

“You’re lying,” he says, and he hates how threatening it sounds when he says it.

“Lawrence…” Adam finally says, and it’s cautious as if he’s attempting to calm down a frightened dog and Lawrence looks at him, points a finger in his face.

“Don’t— Don’t try and pretend that you—”

“Don't do that,” Adam says, interrupts him as if he already knows what Lawrence is trying to say, pushes his finger away and he's lifting his arms up towards Lawrence and he backs away slightly, doesn't get to find out what Adam was planning to try and do because a different, authoritative voice—a frighteningly familiar voice to Lawrence—says:

“Will everyone _please_ just calm down and stop all this shouting. It's completely unnecessary.” Walking up the stairs is a young woman, a lab coat pulled over a tailored suit and her red curls bounce whenever she takes a step. She stops beside Stieber, puts a hand gently on her arm.

“I’m sorry,” Stieber says, “I stalled for as long as I could. I know you wanted—”

“You did great,” the woman says. “Don’t worry. You can go.” She waits for Stieber to nod and take off, coat fluttering behind her as she runs and ducks into Lab C, the door slamming noisily shut. “Well, Lawrence,” she says, “I’m glad to see you made it here intact.” Lawrence tries to say something but when he opens his mouth, nothing but confused noises come fumbling out.

“Lawrence,” he hears Bruce ask apprehensively, “Who is this?”

“Yes,” she says, clapping her hands and clasping them together in front of her, “Who am I?” 

“She— She was one of my doctors,” Lawrence manages to stammer out. “She works for ExoBio,” he says quietly.

“Actually,” she says, “Correction: I _own_ ExoBio. Rebecca Bader. I’m sure you’ve heard of me. I don’t get out much, it’s probably why no one recognized the face. I am a doctor, though, you did technically get that part right. I was just posing as someone way below my pay grade when I visited you. I mean, our very first human test subject? I had to be there in person. This wasn’t something where I could sit up in my office and have some idiot who takes your blood send me reports every few hours.” She pauses to catch her breath and smiles proudly. “You know, I was the one who put your new heart in. Isn’t that something?”

“How’re you— How did you get—”

“I got here the same way everyone gets around these days, Lawrence,” Rebecca says and then stretches her arms out briefly to either side, moving them up and down slightly. “I flew.” She put her arms down. “Now, if you’re asking me how I _knew_ about all of this… We were listening. We are always listening, Lawrence, and I find it truly sad that you actually believed us when we said we weren’t. Don’t you know you should never trust any major corporations? We’re all a bunch of filthy liars.” Rebecca takes one step forward and Lawrence takes one back, walking into one of the others standing behind him.

“I talked— I talked to— They said—” Lawrence can’t get his words to work properly, he hears them in his head but they won’t come out, he can’t make himself make sense and he can’t figure out if it’s because he’s upset or if it was his brain fucking with him at wrong damn time.

“Yeah, here’s the thing,” Rebecca says, “There was no one on the other end of that phone call.”

“But—”

“It didn’t ring. Nobody called you. From our perspective, we saw you react to nothing and then answer a broken phone and start having a conversation. Some of us wanted to intervene, to bring you in because hallucinations are a pretty major red flag but you’re dying anyway. I argued that we might as well continue down the path from observing progress to observing deterioration. Entropy is just as interesting as evolution. It’s all helpful for the future of the project and—” She stops herself, blinks a few times, appears genuinely stunned when she witnesses the distressed expression crashing down on Lawrence’s face and his ears are rushing so loudly with white noise that he almost doesn’t hear her disbelieving laugh or what she says next. “Oh no. Oh. You didn’t—” Finger go to her lips and she looks _amused_. “Yes, Lawrence. You’ve been dying for weeks now. It’s honestly remarkable that you’re still here. Why do you think we sent you home so early after we finished? It wasn’t out of negligence or because you were so damn healthy. You were dying. It was an opportunity. And I figured it’d be nicer for you to kick the bucket at home than stowed away in one of our labs.”

“I can’t be—” Lawrence closes his eyes briefly, takes in a breath. He can’t say the word. It’s lodged in his throat and he’s choking on it but it won’t come out. “I feel fine.”

“Physically, for the most part, yes, I should think so. You’ve got top-of-the-line machines in there. But your brain, on the other hand… The headaches, the hallucinations, the paranoia. The visual glitches. The lost time. I’m sure it’s only gotten worse.” Rebecca tilts her head just a bit, studies Lawrence. “I’m not wrong, am I? Of course not. But you don’t have to tell me about it now. That can wait until later.”

“Later?” Lawrence asks.

“You’re coming back with me, Lawrence,” Rebecca says as if she couldn’t believe that he hadn’t figured that out yet. “That’s why I’m here. To bring you back. Maybe it would have been easier just to not let you leave but where was the harm? We all knew there was nobody out here waiting to help you. Just let him go on his little trip, I said. Pay whoever you need to pay to make sure his pilot’s Shooting Star license somehow still works and get them through the Border,” she says, gestures towards Adam, who was still somewhere behind Lawrence. “They’ll get to Fyto, I’ll be there to take him home. I suppose we could have just stopped you at the Border and taken you in but, like I said: let the poor imbecile have his fun.”

“Hey!” Bruce snaps, responding unfavorably to the word that she had just used to describe Lawrence.

“What about that ship that was following us, that started shooting. Was that you?” Adam asks just past Lawrence’s shoulder and it’s the first thing he’s said in almost fifteen minutes.

“Yes. Some of the others wanted to keep a closer eye on you just in case this whole thing was some masterful ruse and you were really going to sell our secrets to someone. I truly have no idea what was going through their heads when they started shooting. I had nothing to do with that decision, I swear. To be honest, I’m grateful those strangers blew them to pieces so I wouldn’t have to deal with them anymore. A piece of free advice: never hire freelance security. Waste of money. They’re all completely out of their gourds.”

Lawrence’s head is pounding and he holds hands on either side of it and curses. This entire trip was just a story cooked up by a dying brain and all he’s done is walked right back into the arms of the people that had done this to him in the first place. He doesn’t want to go back with them, doesn’t want to go home and wander around like a rat in a plastic habitat or, more likely, be brought to ExoBio to be picked apart and thrown away.

He doesn’t want to leave with her but he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

“I don’t—” He hears himself say, “I’m not going with you.”

“I’m not sure where you got the idea that that you had a choice in that particular matter,” Rebecca says. “The only choice you have to make right now is if you’re going to come willingly or not.” She makes a curled gesture with a finger and a large man with what appeared to be a cattle prod clutched in his meaty hands comes storming up from seemingly nowhere to join her on the landing pad. He towers beside her, sweating even though the air is cool, and she shrugs one shoulder. “We’ll take care of you. We’ll make you comfortable. We’ve put you through enough. There’ll be others. Everything that’s happened will be helpful for the future.” She puts out a hand towards him. “Where else are you going to go? Remember when I said that we’re always listening? I heard what that pilot… what’s his name? Adam? I heard what Adam said: ‘You’ll have to find another way home’. Did he ever really change his mind? I heard what they all said about you when you weren’t there, too.”

“Lawrence,” Peake is saying, “I don’t know how she heard the first part but the rest of it, whatever it is, it isn’t—”

“‘He’s a real monkey on my back’. ‘He’s a liar’. ‘We just have to tolerate him for a few more days’,” Rebecca says, pulls the words out of herself slowly, each one earns a step closer to Lawrence, her hand still outstretched. “‘He’s selfish’. ‘I can’t wait to get rid of him’.” She stops only a foot away, palm up and Lawrence lifts his own hand, starts to give it to her. He can hear Adam and Bruce and even Peake behind him, trying to talk over her but none of it is getting through. _It’s for the best_ , a voice says in the back of his head, speaking from underneath the pain and the thousands of questions. _She’s never strictly lied to you. She’s just omitted some very difficult truths. How is that any different than what you did to get here? You’re dying anyway. She said she was always listening. She heard Adam then, she must have heard him, heard the others, too. She wouldn’t—_ “‘I almost wish something had gone wrong when we were moving to this other ship. Would have been an easy way to get him out of our hair’.” Lawrence freezes.

Something _did_ go wrong. Something went horribly wrong and when he started to float away, they brought him back. What was it James had said? _Adam was freaking out more than me and Bruce combined. I thought he was going to go after you himself if I hadn’t managed to snatch you._

“No,” Lawrence says, withdraws his hand and Rebecca frowns. “No. I’m not— I’m not going with you.” He may not be welcome back on the ship with Adam and the rest, but he wasn’t going to go crawling back to ExoBio on his hands and knees either. He hadn’t been sure about a lot of things since he left, but this, he knew right down to his mechanical core. He wasn’t going anywhere with her.

“Well,” Rebecca says, looks disappointed. “You can’t say I didn’t try. Come on,” she says to the man still waiting behind her, “let’s get him out of here.” She moves out of the way, steps out of the path of very angry bull charging towards a red sheet and just as his fingertips are an inch or two away from brushing against Lawrence’s chest, Adam yells:

“Jesus Christ, Bruce, do what Lawrence fucking hired you for!”

“Oh, right,” Bruce says, steps forward and punches the man directly across the jaw. It has a much greater impact on a man of that size than any of them are expecting and he stumbles backwards, yells and clutches a hand to his face but recovers as Bruce is attempting to wrangle the cattle prod from him, nails him with a hit wherever he could land one, knuckles slamming into his stomach. Bruce let’s out an audible _oof_ , nearly goes down but jams the heel of his shoe into the man’s crotch and _that’s_ enough for him to let go of his weapon. “What do you think this does?” Bruce asks the others but none of them respond. “Hmm. Let’s find out.” He pushes a button on the bottom handle and a snap of visible electricity jolts out from the top. He jams it into the man’s side, watches as he crumples onto the ground in agony, does it second time just for good measure, and then turns his attention to Rebecca who was, surprisingly, still standing there and hadn’t made an attempt to run.

“Well, alright then,” she says and brings her thumb and index finger to her mouth, letting out a piercing whistle and, at that sound, six other men roughly the same size as the one Bruce had just dealt with come charging out of the forest and these ones are all carrying guns. Bruce lifts his newly acquired weapon, let’s another spark of white electricity out but it’s not even close to intimidating a single one of them. “Are you really going to try and fight six armed men with a cattle prod?” She asks.

“I don’t know,” Bruce says. “If they don’t do anything stupid, we won’t have to find out.”

“You won’t win. You won’t win and Lawrence is going to have to watch as we kill his three little friends because we certainly aren’t going to kill him.” 

“Yeah, but that’s where you’re wrong,” Adam says. “Lawrence doesn’t have three friends.”

“He doesn’t? How many does he have, then? Zero?” Rebecca asks.

“No,” Peake says, “He’s got five.”

“Wh—” Rebecca starts but doesn’t get a chance to finish as a short burst of gunshots echo from behind her and she ducks, watches as three of her men drop like sacks of potatoes, blood splattering as they fall. The three remaining men turn, start to blindly fire and James and Elyse just barely jump out of the way of the spray of bullets in time, hide themselves in the thick bushes with purple leaves that lined the sides of the man-made path.

Bruce takes this opportunity while their backs are turned to run forward and he thrusts the end of his prod into the neck of the man with the largest gun and he immediately stops firing and drops his firearm with a clatter on the hard ground. He stabs him again just as he had done with the first guy and then leans down to pick up the discarded gun with one hand, tosses the prod backwards with the other and Adam catches it. Rebecca is screaming over the cacophony at her men to _stop shooting, you’re wasting ammo, this idiot over here has one of your fucking guns_ , but they don’t hear her until their clips are empty and they need to reload.

“You fucking morons,” Rebecca screeches, “He’s got a gun!”

They turn, look over just in time to see Bruce wave at them and, seconds later, they’ve both been blown off the landing pad. Once they’re sure that everything is clear and they won’t be walking face first into death, James and Elyse pull themselves up from the ground and brush their clothes off before climbing the stairs to join the rest of them and James tucks a small pistol back into a holster that was hidden under his jacket.

“What the hell do you have one of those for?” Adam asks him and James lifts his shoulders.

“Does it matter? You should just be happy that I did. What the hell happened out here? We’re in the lab, minding our own business and suddenly we hear all this yelling and we look out to see guns everywhere.” He slowly shakes his head with mock disapproval. “We leave you alone for five minutes…”

“I’ll explain it all later, I promise, but now’s really not the best time,” Adam says and James shrugs.

“Eh,” he says, looks around at the carnage, at the mess they were all still currently in the middle of, “Fair enough.”

“What do we want to do with her?” Bruce asks and they see him standing beside Rebecca, the collar of her jacket clutched in one of his hands. She’s not struggling but her face is bright red with fury. “I mean, it’s probably not the best idea but I could…” He starts to lift the gun he’s holding and the rage in Rebecca’s eyes flicker, start to become a wet sort of fear.

“No,” Lawrence says. “Don’t. I just want leave.” As much as a terrifying part of him wants to see her dead, he doesn’t think having the blood of the CEO of a major corporation on his hands was going to do him any favors and, at this point, he wouldn’t put it past her to have some sort of plan in place to make it loudly clear after her death that it was her own ingenious creation that had destroyed her in the end. There would be many that saw her as foolish, as getting what she deserved, but there were hundreds of thousands of others that would hold her up as a martyr. _She died for progress_. _She died trying to improve the future of mankind as we know it_.

So, yes, there was a part of him that wanted her dead, but there was another part that didn’t think he could bear to see her be revered.

“Leave?” Rebecca laughs wildly. “You want to— As I asked before: where the hell are you going to go? I’m the only one who can help you, Lawrence! Not the imaginary people you talked to on your stupid phone, not your simple-minded friends! Me! Me and my company. All of this bloodshed could have been avoided. We could have been—” She takes in a few deep breaths, tries to calm her voice, to ease her tone. “It’s not too late. You can still come with me. My ship is just past the labs. Just come with me, Lawrence. I have more men out there waiting for my signal. If you come with me now, your friends don’t have to die. Because they will. They will because I have more, more of everything. I will always have more. I will always be better. You can’t fight. Give this up. Walk away. Come with—”

“Oh my god, _shut up_ ,” Elyse says, grabs the cattle prod from Adam’s hands, marches forward and pushes the tip against Rebecca’s shoulder. Bruce lets go just in time and Rebecca screams, staggers backwards and loses her footing, tumbles off the landing pad. They listen to the sound of her head smacking hard against something and she falls eerily silent. Bruce stands on his toes to peer over the edge and makes a face. “Are we gonna get the heck outta here or what?” Elyse asks when nobody moves, gestures sharply towards their ships and they all abruptly and silently start to leave.

“Wait,” Lawrence says, stops in his tracks just a few feet away from the front of the _Benson_ and the others halt as well, all of them turning back around. “Wait.”

“Lawrence, we have to go,” Bruce says. “I have a really shitty feeling that she wasn’t lying about having a bunch of other guys hanging around and at some point they’re gonna notice that something is wrong.”

“I know! I just—” Lawrence rubs at his temples, and then drops his hands, sighs. “What if she’s right? What if she’s the only one who could have helped me? She said I was—”

“Yeah,” Adam says, “We heard that.” He pulls a hand through his hair, takes a step forward. “Look: maybe she is right. Maybe there is no one else out there who can help you.”

“Thanks,” Lawrence replies, the word dripping with sarcasm.

“Would you just— She might be right. But we don’t know that for sure. This universe is fucking _infinite_ and you’re telling me that there isn’t _anybody_... that there isn’t a single other person out there who can do something? Do you realize how stupid that is?”

“So what are you saying?” Lawrence asks. “You guys are just going to fly me around until we find that one person out there who can fix me?”

“Yeah,” Adam says. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“I’m in,” Bruce says without hesitation, raises a hand. “I owe a guy three thousand dollars back home. The longer I stay away, the more time I have not to pay him. Peake?”

“Totally. I’m game,” Peake says. Everyone turns to look at James and Elyse, who share a look of their own before shrugging simultaneously.

“Why not,” James says.

“What about Zycian?” Lawrence asks.

“Fuck ‘em,” Elyse says and leaves it at that.

“There you go,” Adam says, looks to Lawrence, hands out towards him, waiting.

“Are you really sure about this?” Lawrence asks.

“Listen,” Adam says, “I’m probably always going to be a little pissed about you not telling us the truth right from the beginning, for putting us in this position in the first place but you’re my friend. Friends don’t let friends die if they can help it. Besides, you still owe me six thousand dollars. I did get you here, didn’t I?”

“Six? I thought you were giving that thousand I gave you to not ask questions back,” Lawrence says.

“Fine,” Adam says. “Five thousand.” A slight pause. “You know, this whole plan won’t make sense if you aren’t coming.”

“Yeah,” Lawrence says after a moment where he looks to each of them, to their open and expectant faces. “Sure. Let’s do it.”

“Hey, so,” James says a minute later to Adam when the group finally finds themselves standing in between the two ships still connected side-by-side, “It’d be a lot easier to get out of here if we just left your ship behind and we—”

“No,” Adam says, crosses his arms over his chest, “Absolutely not.”

“You really expect us to tow that thing across the galaxy?”

“Yes!” Adam exclaims.

“Come on,” Bruce says, puts a hand on his shoulder, “I’m gonna hate to see it go, too, but it’s dead weight.”

“I’ve had it for twenty years, Bruce,” Adam says softly.

“I know, buddy,” Bruce says and Adam stares up at the _Reaper_ , at the cracks in the metal, at the torn open fuel tank and the gaping hole in the side.

“Fuck,” Adam whispers, and then: “Fine. We’ll leave it.” James looks up at the cockpit window of the _Benson_ and salutes. There’s movement from inside and suddenly there’s a loud wrenching sound and the metal pole that held the ships together dislodges from Adam’s ship, retracts back into from where it came from, tucking neatly into a compartment in the _Benson_ ’s hull. “She was already in there?” Adam asks disbelievingly. “What, was she going to do it even if I said ‘no’?”

“Probably,” James says. Pieces of Adam’s ship had broken off when the metal had removed itself from the hull and Adam walks over to the mess, picks up one of the smaller bits, tucks it into a pocket and then gestures towards the _Benson_ , a look on his face as if he’s daring one of them to say something about it.

They all climb inside, eventually joining Elyse in the cockpit and she bows slightly, indicates towards the main chair that she had just abandoned, looks, not to James, but Adam. 

“This is your ship now, too,” she says. “You want to fly us out of here?”

“Why not,” Adam sighs and he sits down. After a few quick movements of his fingers over the screen, the _Benson_ lifts easily off the ground and, slowly, they begin the ascend. Lawrence watches as the ground gets smaller, watches the bodies become tiny specks in the distance, blending in with the dark trees and their contorted branches.

“You alright?” Peake asks Lawrence quietly and Lawrence glances down at him and nods.

“Yeah,” Lawrence says as they burst through the planet’s atmosphere, as they keep climbing and, ultimately, find their way back up into the stars and the endless void. “For now.”

“Where to first?” Adam asks and everyone looks at Lawrence.

“I don’t know,” Lawrence says, stares out the window for awhile before finally pointing east. “That way.”

“That way it is.” Adam punches in a string of seemingly meaningless numbers onto the screen in front of him and the ship turns. “Time to go find a needle in an impossibly large haystack,” he says, hits a button with the side of his fist and starts to fly.

**Author's Note:**

> You know, when I started watching Funhaus recently, the very last thing I expected to happen was this.
> 
> I feel like there’s a lot I need to apologize for when it comes to this fic. I won’t list everything that I’m sorry about, though (we could be here all night) so I guess I’ll just issue a blanket apology for all of it. It’s a bizarre idea that nobody had asked me to write.
> 
> Hopefully, despite all of that, there’s at least two or three people out there somewhere that like this ridiculous mess.


End file.
